


Crazy Madcap Redemption

by Hello_Spikey



Category: Angel: the Series
Genre: F/M, Mental Health Issues
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2008-03-17
Updated: 2008-10-20
Packaged: 2019-06-14 05:04:47
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 17
Words: 32,526
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15381270
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Hello_Spikey/pseuds/Hello_Spikey
Summary: Drusilla returns, not to be evil, but to reconnect. Can Spike draw her to the light before she draws him to the dark?





	1. Prologue: Can't

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Just a hypothetical meeting of Spike and Dru during Angel season 5 - oh say somewhere between "Soul Purpose" and "Damage". No warnings, though there's a little blood.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Today was my day for Seasonal Spike and Drusilla!
> 
> This is most likely LAME because I procrastinated, panicked and wrote at the last last minute. I was gonna just post an excerpt of "Mad Queen" but I got guilty feeling about that and had to make something new.

They’d had a good long day and night of it, fighting evil from within the evil heart of Wolfram and Hart, and Spike was racing the dawn back to his flat after picking up a few essentials. This was a road well-traveled in the past and he didn’t expect to see anything that would rock him from his end-of-night reverie.

But there she was, across the street from his building, leaning against a light post. She should have been awash in light, magnificent somehow, but she just looked lost.

Spike, for his part, nearly dropped his groceries. “Drusilla.”

She rocked her head against the light post. “Daddy’s cross with me.”

“Yeah,” Spike smiled through his shock, almost laughed. “Yeah he is, petal. On account you’re an unlivin’ reminder of what a bastard he was.”

One bare arm snaked over her head. Dru was wearing a strapless gown, a ragged prom-dress in faded blue organdy. She always did like to dress up. “The fairies lied, Spike. They all said you were going to burn up. Poof! Like tissue paper, all golden light exploding from inside.”

The bottle of bourbon in his paper bag was threatening to tear through and Spike had to re-adjust the bag in his arms. “Um… well, I did, pet. Burned right up.”

“Oh.” Drusilla straightened away from the post and looked at him earnestly. “Good. I’d thought I’d gone quite mad.”

Spike did laugh then, and dropped his bag, bottles clinking as Drusilla wound her arms between his. They stared at each other, arms just resting around each other, not yet pulled into an embrace, neither sure of what to do, both gazing in surprise.

Dru’s eyes were still hypnotic. Spike shook himself from the spell. “Would you like to come in? Sun’s almost up.”

“They brought you back to me,” Drusilla said. “You were gone forever but they brought you back.” Her fingertips ghosted over his cheek.

He took her hand in his and pressed his lips to the cool palm. “I’ll take that as a ‘yes’. Come on, love. Don’t wanna burn up again.”

It was too easy, too familiar, gathering up the grocery bag, feeling briefly to ensure the bottles were still intact, then taking Dru’s arm and leading her into the building. She smiled and giggled, eyes roving over the dull scenery of the building lobby and the stairs down to his apartment. Drusilla saw a million private jokes in the plain beige walls and industrial green carpet, and her fingertips brushed his arm to share them.

“I should want to kill you,” Spike said, more to himself than her, as he let her in. He set the groceries on the table. Drusilla walked along the wall, hand skimming over the surface as though feeling for ley-lines. “Still evil, pet? You kill anyone today?”

“Beautiful little boy from far away. So much hope and sunshine. But he had hamburger grease under his nails.” Drusilla turned from her inspection of the wall to make a face.

“Right,” Spike said, his voice heavy and flat. He leaned against the kitchen counter, watching her inspect the room, and turned this over in his mind, poking at it like a wound.

“Do you still have the nasty wires in your head?” She had made a full circuit of the room and poked now at his temple experimentally. “Fizz and spark and no no bad dog!”

“Can’t let you kill again, love,” he said, quietly.

“Can’t! Won’t!” She threw her hands up and glared at him.

It looked like she was about to strike him, so Spike took her wrists in hand. “Can’t you see it in me, pet? You could see it in Angel; you said so. I never could tell the difference, but you could. Can you?”

“No,” she said, and sank back, trying to pull her arms from his grip. “No. Nooo!”

“I got my soul, love. It’s a tighter leash than the chip ever was. Can’t do it. Can’t be yours again, not like I was.”

Drusilla’s protests rose into a wordless wail and she collapsed in his arms, unwilling or unable to hold herself up. Spike found himself sliding down the wall, cradling her in his lap. “Shush, shush, love, there…” he smoothed tear-wet locks back from her face and kissed her forehead.

She cried it out, helpless hands slapping at him, rocking her head against the hollow of his shoulder. She looked so little, young and helpless. He smoothed the taffeta and organdy of her dress, tucked it around her feet, which were clad in a frayed pair of ballet slippers.

Slowly her cries descended into whimpers and snuffles, and then quieted into only the occasional sniffle. “Christ, Dru. What’m I supposed to do with you? You can’t even imagine what it’s like… what’s right and wrong. Poor love.” He stared helplessly at the dreary grey wall opposite them. It didn’t have any answers written on it. “Soul’s a terrible thing. You know I actually thought it would make my life simpler? Heh. Was a right pillock, wasn’t I?”

She slipped out of his arms, crawled backward like a startled cat, staring at him.

“Drusilla?” He reached toward her.

Her smile stretched tear-bright cheeks. “Silly Spike. You have to get rid of it. Nasty, awful, wicked soul!”

He shifted to his knees, reaching for her arm. “Doesn’t work like that, petal. Here… let’s not get too worked up. Have a hot cuppa blood and get some sleep, yeah?”

She let him take hold of her arm and guide her toward the meager dinette set’s only chair, but when he let go to see to the groceries – part of which was a quart of Mrs. Wong’s finest pigs blood – she lunged at him. She wrapped her arms tight around his shoulders, strong and supple like steel cables.

“No, Spike. It has to come out. Same as before. Of course, sweet William! I know your heart, know how to get at it.”

“Dru…” he turned in her embrace, tried to get her to meet his gaze, but her head was tilted to the side, studying his neck.

She struck like a viper, hard and fast, arms squeezing him to encourage the stagnant blood to flow. He was so startled he just let it happen for a moment, felt the sharp, unexpected pleasure and pain of Drusilla’s teeth luring him into memory, into yearning…

He pushed gently at first, to disentangle, her fingernails dug in and she growled into his shoulder. “No, Dru… it won’t work, love… God, pet…”

He pushed her away, feeling the skin tear after her. Felt like ripping a limb off. He noted that, good seed for a poem. A bloody awful angst-ridden poem.

Drusilla glared at him, her mouth and chin red with his blood. “Bad Spike! You’re confused. The golden light’s driving you mad. Let mummy pull it out.”

“Won’t work. You can drain me and fill me up again, but it isn’t going to work. Already a vampire, love. That hasn’t changed. Still your blood in here.” He set his hand on his heart.

She shook her head, tears welling afresh. The blood on her chin made a bizarre, exaggerated clown-frown.

Spike took hold of her shoulders, drew her close. “You’re still in here,” he said, taking her hand and resting it over his unbeating heart. “Yeah, love?”

Her lips were slick, slow to respond. But soon the kiss deepened, and he felt his own blood smeared, felt her, almost crying himself because the taste was familiar, the touch of her tongue like returning to a long-forgotten home.

He didn’t regret a thing they’d done when alone. When there were no victims. He tried to partition his memory, only recall those intimate moments – but even those were too often sanguine.

He broke the kiss, eyes squeezed shut. “I’m going to hell,” he said.

Drusilla was licking the wound on his neck, making soft, soothing noises like she was comforting him. Perhaps, in her mind, she was.

“Why’d you have to come back, Dru? Why couldn’t I just pretend…? Ah, love, you know I can’t… can’t let you leave. Can’t let you kill.” She’d finished cleaning the wound and was working her way up his neck.

“Poor Spike,” she kissed his jaw. “Always says ‘can’t’ when he means ‘won’t’. There’s more ‘can’t’ in your head than in the world.”

“Love?” He brushed her hair back. “Could you do it? Could you give up killin’, for love? I’ll provide for you. You could drink from me, if you like, if it helps.”

She pouted at him. Blood was now smeared on her face like frosting. He wondered how he looked.

“You can’t, can you?” He answered for her.

She stroked his cheek. “I can make you my strong prince and we will be together forever, fate sealed in a kiss.”

Spike felt something break inside him. In his heart, or more likely his brain. He leaned against her. “All right, pet. Just for tonight, let’s pretend that’s the way it is. Just for tonight.”

And they started to sway, to dance to the music only Drusilla heard, from the stars or fairies or the powers that fuck with us, whatever it was that hummed to her. They swayed around the kitchenette and Spike’s pig’s blood spoiled on the table.

She tasted familiar and strange, his blood bland on spicy lips. “Gonna have to kill you in the morning,” he said.

“Sh,” she said. “You can’t.”

He woke late in the afternoon, alone, leaden and feverish. Dried blood was soaked in to the surface of his cheap mattress – the bed sheets rumpled all on the floor.

And he hoped, fervently, contradictory and at once, that she’d come back and he’d never see her again.


	2. Chapter One: The Morning After

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warnings: Het sex, craziness, violence, references to nasty things happening in the past. Really a pretty mild fic considering it's about Dru!
> 
> This was a challenge proposed by a friend: to write a redemption story for Drusilla. She's still crazy, still soulless.
> 
> There is a prologue to this piece, it's short, I wrote it for **seasonal_sd**. 
> 
> This first chapter is kind of weak, I admit, but I hope you'll hang in there for chapter two, which I really like. :)

Drusilla didn’t like Los Angeles. It was too sunny too often, for one thing, and the stars didn’t like being veiled from sight. She could feel them pouting behind the smog, recriminating her for hiding from them.

But she’d loved those few, too-short days with Grandmummy, shopping, eating, just being GIRLS again.

She trailed her fingers through the soft, spongy potting soil and remembered the thrill of motherhood. She looked up at smeared panels and rusty metal, and the stars snuck winks into bubbles and chinks in the glass.

The greenhouse machinery huffed and grumbled in a corner like a living thing, the plants around her swaying in the slight breeze. Here she’d come to plant Darla, because Grandmummy had always loved a good view. She spent her life only seeing ceilings, she said, or bedcovers. She would stand at a window and drink in the vistas like muscatel. Grandmummy was always nicest, prettiest, when she was enjoying the view.

Windows twinkled like little stars all carpeted below them. Drusilla could see them if she stood up. Like the stars on the water when they crossed the Pacific. Oh, that had been a fine voyage. Though not nearly enough expendable crewmen.

Drusilla rubbed her tummy absently. Daddy had been so cross, locking her in her cabin until they could put to shore and snack on tourists. It wasn’t her fault the captain was so tasty.

Which brought her to thoughts about eating. She didn’t remember whom she’d had last, or if it was time to eat again or not.

She whimpered miserably and rolled in the potting bed. Things were so confusing without her daddy or her Spike, or Grandmummy; there had always been someone to make things happen in the right order. On her own, people had a habit of disappearing, or appearing, and with guns and lights and chains, and there was fighting and running and when it was all over she’d still be hungry. Oh it was hard, dining on one’s own.

But Spike didn’t want her. Grandmummy was nowhere to be found. And Daddy… she didn’t like to think about Daddy anymore. Not since the burning. The Angel Beast was worse than ever and she feared him: Hard, bright soul burning in his eyes and hard anger in his chest. He was the worst of Daddy and the worst of Angel. She feared she’d never get him back again. The stars used to promise her he would come back.

Coming and going in sleek cars, looking out of glass with the sun falling in on him. There was something WRONG with the Angel-beast.

And her Spike!

Drusilla dragged her fingertips over her breastbone, feeling the gentle sting and scoring. Should she try to go back? He’d been sweet, almost his old self, but that soul laying over it all like treacle. And she couldn’t suck it out of him; no matter how hard she tried!

She needed her cards. She reached for them, but they were gone. She’d lost them. She’d lost lots of things and her dress had somehow gotten dirty.

She sat up and swung her legs over the sharp wooden lip of the potting bed, scowling at the dirt-smeared taffeta over her knees. This was precisely the sort of thing that happened without explanation when she was alone.

No, it simply wouldn’t do to be alone anymore. Her Spike was the only option near reasonable. She crawled down from the shelf and dusted herself off, new-born, like her Grandmummy. That must have been why the stars lead her here. New starts needed ceremony. She licked her lips and laughed in expectation. How she loved new things!

***

Spike showered twice that morning after Drusilla had visited – taking a break to let the pathetic hot water tank fill up again -- though that was an act of misplaced faith. His skin was stinging and he’d broken his soap in half, but he couldn’t risk Angel smelling her on him… knowing Drusilla was around. The brooding wonder would… would…

Spike didn’t know what Angel would do, but he was sure it was better left not done.

He picked at the wound on his neck. There, and his left hip and right pec, where she’d bitten him. He tried to claw soap into the flesh, to banish any lingering trace. There was something about bites… saliva, maybe, buried deep under the skin… that made them easy for a vampire to scent. He’d always known when someone else had bitten a victim, or one of the family had gotten snacky in the night.

Spike made a quick stop at the thrift store on the end of his block to get a collared shirt, just to cover the bite marks. The selection had been crap, but he found a blue flannel where the cotton was worn soft from too many washings and no lingering scent of a former owner could be detected.

He had to hopscotch shadows to the building – LA had shit for sewers – pun intended, and no underground to speak of. And while Wolfram and Hart had convenient and necessary underground access, well, he wasn’t fond of their basement. Place still gave him the creeps.

Anyway, Spike was used to the commute by now. And maybe a little whiff of singed hair would come out on his side.

He couldn’t believe he was this nervous about Angel SMELLING him.

He fidgeted nervously with his collar as he entered the building. He was supposed to contact Fred for assignments, and report on who or what he’d killed, just to be sure he didn’t upset the corporate agenda too much. He knew this was set up so he wouldn’t bother Angel, which was why he always reported to Angel. But today he’d just go to Fred. Call it keeping them on their toes. In, out, no poofter…

Spike plowed right into Angel’s chest turning a corner. Which, he realized as he shook the Eu de CEO from his nose, was just about pre-ordained, given his luck in general.

“What do you want, Spike?” Angel rolled his eyes skyward in long-suffering-sire-expression number two. (Angel only had about five expressions, total, that Spike could identify, and three of them were in the ‘long-suffering-sire’ category.)

Spike adjusted his collar. “Got a date with science girl. Outta my way, wide load.”

Angel’s features settled into the slightly constipated expression that meant he was going to try to actually interact, socially. “Listen, last night…”

Spike held up a hand to cut him off. “Let’s not go sobbing into each other’s blouses, there, peaches.”

“Give it a rest, Spike. I just wanted to say you weren’t completely useless for a change.”

Spike had to choke down his own desire to bait the poof. It was far too easy an opening. And he was in the maroon shirt again, so easy to – no! No! He had to be firm. The last thing he needed was extra time in the sire’s company. “Thanks,” he said, through gritted teeth, and strode past Angel as fast as he could without looking like he was running.

If he’d looked over his shoulder he would have had to add a new expression to his catalogue; Angel blinked in smooth-faced confusion.


	3. Chapter Two: Simple Sister

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Here's more of the Spike/Dru fic! Some bloodplay, m/f luvin'. Lyrics from Procol Harum's "Simple Sister".
> 
> I've decided, see, that Drusilla is more into acid rock than punk. She appreciates psychedelic lyrics. :D

_“Simple sister… got whooping cough… have to burn her toys…”_

Spike paused in the corridor outside his apartment. None of his neighbors with their thin walls played music much. It was strictly a loud game-show crowd. Coughing-into-the-night retirees. What was more, the thrumming baseline seemed to be coming from his door. He shifted his keys to his right hand and turned the knob. It was open. The plate on the jam was ripped free, splintered wood hanging.

_“Wear her clothes, take her bows…”_

Drusilla twirled in the center of the room, playing with a silk scarf, dark burgundy like her dress, which was a bridesmaid-ly thing with a high waist, just the sort she always loved. The room was festooned in silk swaths, draping over the drab furnishings and the particleboard countertops.

Spike thought, _this is what it feels like to be staked._

Drusilla tossed her scarf over the kitchen chair. It floated into place like a dying ballerina. “Spike! You had no music! Very silly of you. I went shopping.”

And her cool arms were around his neck, her lithe body swaying as she backed him into the room. “We’ll have music again. And dancing. And color.”

_“…hope she never gets well.”_

Spike disentangled himself and staggered to the end table by the couch, which now sported a new CD player and a messy stack of CDs, most still wrapped, with their theft-prevention stickers glinting in the low light.

Drusilla followed him like a cloak, her hands tracing his shape, clutching now and again to his waist or arm.

He pressed the power button. He turned over the open CD case. It had a tiny reproduction of the lush album art, grainy like an old photograph. “You take the whole psychedelic bin at the Record Mart?”

“We always had music,” she said. “My Spike, how could you live like this? Dark grey room. Dark grey sounds.”

“Didn’t seem important.” He shuffled the CD cases, caught the cheerful yellow of “Never Mind the Bollocks” and a hot pink “Punk of the 80s” compilation. So she hadn’t just grabbed a handful. She’d shopped. All his old favorites where here, along with her more lyric choices.

He let the plastic cases clatter together and slide to the floor. Disaffected youth, rebellion, hedonism. Just three decades of a hundred years spent like a teenager. “This isn’t me anymore, pet.”

She was still swaying, still hearing music. Her hands met on his stomach, pulled him tight against her. “You’re still my Spike. Still my bad boy.”

He shook his head. “Don’t feel bad. Have to settle for occasionally naughty, these days.” He turned in her embrace, took hold of her arms and pushed her gently away. “What are you doing here, Dru?”

She pouted at him, for all the world like she’d done nothing more wretched than get caught sneaking sweets before dinner. “The fairies take everything away, Spike. Sometimes they make it so that it’s already happened or hasn’t been born yet and I’m so, so tired.”

“I told you last night, pet. I… if you stay with me, you can’t kill. No more killing.”

She sank before him, making him take her weight where he held her arms. Her wrists came together, supplicating. She wailed. “No no no. The stars! So alone!”

“Dru, love, I can tell when you’re faking a fit to get what you want.”

“Oh.” She stood. “Will you, William? Will you take your princess back? I’ll be oh so good. And if I’m not you may spank me!”

Spike could feel warning bells going off: that airless feeling in his gut that said “Bad decision, mate, turn back while you can!” He wondered if he was ever going to learn to follow that feeling. “All right, petal. You can stay. We’ll make it work, somehow. I’ll help you.”

Drusilla bounced in excitement and nipped at his nose. “We’ll have such fun.” She danced to the CD player and turned it on again. She picked a maroon scarf off the couch and draped it over the table-lamp, where it immediately started to smoke.

Spike snatched it away and beat the smoldering flame out against his jeans. “They’d have a hard time deciding which of us is barmier right now,” he muttered, and guided Dru, who was dancing still, to the couch and gently pushed her down to sit.

She folded her hands in her lap and looked up at him, the perfect image of obedience.

Oh what a false image that was. He paced. “I need to know you aren’t off eating the neighbors while I’m gone. I mean it, Dru. You kill one person – one solitary person, and this whole thing is off.”

“What about puppies?” she asked.

Spike started to say puppies were all right, but then he remembered her calling Xander a puppy. “We’ll hunt together. Or better yet, you’ll drink from me. All right? Remember how we were after Prague? When you were too weak and the mob was close behind us? I did all the hunting for both of us.”

Drusilla scowled. “Oh Spike, there’s no reason to do that again. I’m all better.”

He knelt in front of her, took her hands. “You’re not. Drusilla, love, you know you’re not well.”

She tilted her head quizzically. “Daddy’s blood made me all better. You took care of me, Spike. You always do.”

“Yes,” he knocked her little hands together. “I do. And I will. I’ll take care of you, pet. Maybe… maybe make you all the way well. Would you like that?”

She smiled indulgently at him and patted his shoulder. “I want cards,” she said. “I’ve lost mine. And Miss Edith. Have you seen her, Spike? And Miss Catherine and Miss Julia. I’ve misplaced them all.”

Spike sighed, mentally reprimanded himself again, and said, “We’ll find them, princess. We’ll get you all set up with pretty things.”

Dru rewarded him with a happy clap.

He stood, running his hands over his hair again. “Well, I’m going to have my supper now, pet. Will you join me?”

Drusilla licked her lips and rubbed her belly. Spike grimaced. Had this childishness actually turned him on, once upon a time? He walked to the fridge and got out the blood in its sticky-rimmed carton. He set it on the table and opened the cupboard to get out his mug – which was the only thing in said cupboard. Oh, the kitchen of the lonely bachelor!

Drusilla sniffed at the carton and made a face. “I can’t eat _that_ ,” she said.

“You get used to it,” he said, and poured the thick liquid. It did smell a bit of refrigerator. Not the freshest he could have had on hand. “It’ll taste better when you take it from me,” Spike said, not sure if it would or not. Had he bitten Angel in their big battle royale? He couldn’t remember if he had, much less how it had tasted.

But magic will out, right? He popped the mug in the microwave and hit the button he’d programmed to heat one mug of blood just right. “Also better when it’s body temperature,” he said.

Drusilla was peering at the last bits of blood coating the sides of the plastic container, rolling it in her hands to watch them drip and slide. “I think I’d rather eat the plastic. Heating machines and animals bleeding out their last in slaughter-houses.” She set the container down delicately. “Death should happen at home, shouldn’t it, Spike? It should be personal and violent and oh so delicious!”

Spike was gulping down the pigs blood as fast as he could. Dru’s commentary hadn’t helped the taste and he just wanted dinner over.

He wiped his mouth and set the mug in the sink to rinse later. “Pay attention, love, because this is the important part.” He braced his arms against the table and looked steadily at Dru until her wandering gaze finally settled on him. “People don’t deserve to die,” he said.

She made a moue at him.

“I’m serious. They’re not happy meals with legs, they’re people. Just like you and me. They have hopes and dreams and mums and maybe a great-aunt they always wished they’d spent more time with and if we kill them, pet, then great-aunt never gets that visit.”

Drusilla set her pretty little chin on her hand and frowned in concentration. “Is she tasty?”

“No. No, pet. It’s not about eating. It’s not about what you or I want, it’s about what _they_ want. They want to keep on living.”

“But I don’t care what they want!”

He sank lower, his elbows, now, on the table top. “I know. I know you don’t. Do you remember before you met Angelus? Do you remember growing up with your mum and your dad and your sisters? When they were all alive and you where just a girl?”

Drusilla’s eyes got bigger, her lips started to quail.

Spike set his head on the table. “Don’t cry, love, don’t cry. I just want you to remember how you felt, how you thought about things, when you were alive and, and you were happy.”

A whine grew at the back of her throat. She jumped up, knocking the table back and Spike off of it. “No, no, no! You’re all wrong. Spike isn’t sad. Doesn’t think about back then. Dead times! Spike lives for now for kill blood violence sex! It’s not right at all!”

“Kitten,” he walked around the table to carefully take her wrists in hand. She was about to start one of her fits, for real. Sometimes, if he was lucky, Spike could head them off by holding her still and calming her. “Sh. Spike’s here. It’s me, yeah? Still me.” He folded his arms around her and drew her in, though she struggled and punched his chest a few times. She kicked, too, just once, his left shin. He pulled her tighter and stroked her hair from behind. “Shh. Shh. There’s my girl.”

There was a moment, a breaking point, where she would either go all out, or not. She did not. Her head dropped to his shoulder. “I’m so terribly hungry,” she said, like nothing at all had happened.

“Then drink from me, pet. Drink your fill.”

Her lips brushed the underside of his jaw. “Such a silly game to play.”

“I know, but play it for me, yeah? Let’s pretend.”

She rocked against him, pressing her pelvis to his, undulating in a way he tried to ignore. She didn’t seem the least interested in feeding. He let his hold on her relax, left his hands on the small of her back and they danced, a while, to no music.

Her fangs slipped into his throat gently, almost as an afterthought. Her arms rose to get a better grip, better leverage as she sucked and drank. She must really have been hungry because she pulled a long time at his veins. He felt the burning that came with emptiness toward the end and gently pushed her away.

She licked her lips.

“How did that taste, petal?”

“Like board rooms and paper,” she said. “Slick and dull.”

“I don’t taste like me anymore?”

“My Spike,” she said, stroking her fingers down his cheek. “Always tastes like smoke and violence.”

“Yeah? Could you taste the spark?”

She pursed her lips and pushed at his chest. “Silly! The golden light isn’t a taste. Doesn’t have flavor or texture or weight or height. It’s up here.” She waved her fingertips over his eyes. “Silly boy thinks he can add light to blood. Sometimes I think you’re quite mad and don’t know it.”

“I think you’re right.” Spike took a step back, gently disentangling himself from Dru and the heady scent of her growing arousal. “How about some telly before bed?”

She followed him, arms wrapping around his neck. “How about some bed before bed? Grar!” She snapped her teeth at him.

“I don’t suppose you’d be up to a frank discussion of relationships, would you?”

“Growl! Play with kitty.”

“Always horny after you eat. I remember that.” He let her push him back toward the little single bed. “It’s not that I don’t care about you, love. I do. But you’re, well, mad. And I have this conscience now that’s telling me this isn’t the best way to set about your therapy.”

She stepped back and pushed him fully over, so he landed with a gasp, flat on his back on the bed. Then she dragged the sides of her skirt up her legs so she could crawl over him. “Bad, bad doggy! No talking until mummy’s had her treat!”

“A treat, am I? Thought I tasted like ashes.”

She scowled down at him. “Don’t make fun of me. Ashes you were. I saw it and it was.”

“Sorry, petal. Mean of me.” He brushed her hair back from her cheek. “How I would have liked to have known you, when you were alive.”

“Don’t be foolish. You were just a little boy when mummy was alive.” Her hands smoothed up and down his stomach. “And I’ve no time for little boys. They pull my pigtails and call me names.” She stuck out her tongue.

“I’m sure they didn’t. They were fools if they did.”

Dru leaned down, her face hovering inches above Spike’s, her eyes moving rapidly as she studied him. “I can still see them… the tiny burning fishes.”

“What are they like, kitten? The fishies?”

“Purple,” she said, and frowned. “One of them is a pillow.”

Spike licked his lips. “What else do you see?”

“Dark,” she said, frown deepening. “Dark, empty, alone places where the ashes sleep. Oh, Spike, it’s no light at all, is it? Just a cold, burning spark that gives no warmth and no comfort.”

“You see me dying, kitten? Do I die soon?”

She shook her head. “Don’t want death, sweet William. She won’t be kinder a third time.” And she lowered her lips to his.

How strange, after so long, he thought, to kiss cold lips. And as she slipped their clothing aside, how cold she was between her thighs. He gasped as suddenly he was sheathed in her, unprepared for the sensation, the familiarity of it. There was no warning heat radiating from a vampire’s body, but still her fluid flowed sweet and plentiful around him.

“Oh god, Dru.”

“Sh!” She put her finger on his lips. “No God. God is for Daddy.”

Spike closed his eyes and rolled his head back, moving up as she moved down, matching her rhythm with long practiced ease. “’M going to hell,” he said, not to anyone in particular.

“Of course you are, sweet William, we all are.” Her lips trailed wet over his, down his jaw and then latched onto his neck, biting afresh right near to her previous feeding. He arched up at the pain. But she wasn’t draining him now, just letting her fangs stay in his flesh for the feel of it. Her own willowy neck arched in front of him, and he knew she expected him to bite, but he couldn’t do that. Didn’t want to, so he set blunt teeth to her skin and nibbled until the blood bloomed underneath.

His body fit against hers like a hand returning to an old, favorite glove. He kissed the mark he made on her shoulder. “Think I’m still in love with you, princess. Shouldn’t be. Oughtn’t be. But I am.”

“Shush, butterflies.” Drusilla dragged her fangs up his neck, raising a welt and then kissing it. “No one here but us, now. No one else at last.”

And perhaps she’s right, because he’s not thinking of other partners, other places, as he loses himself inside her and spends with a cry like dying, cold alike to cold, he is emptied into her.


	4. Chapter Three: Veterans of the Psychic Wars

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A short chappie - I wrote this not thinking of chapter breaks, so the lengths are going to vary.
> 
> Some lyrics from Blue Oyster Cult - "Veteran of the Psychic Wars" and "Astronomy". But just a line of each, I promise, no more luxuriating in lyrics like I did with "Simple Sister". :)

Spike was slow to get out of bed, all waxy and sucked-out he was, an empty treat. But there was no sign of the golden light, now, spark safely hidden behind his soft eyelids.

Drusilla picked up his arm and let it fall again, sad that her dolly wouldn’t get up. Again. She was always breaking her toys.

Still, her belly was full and she wasn’t afraid. Things were making sense, for a good solid long time now – hours and hours. The room was the same as when she’d fallen asleep. She so hated it when rooms changed on her. (The naughty things!)

She hummed and danced into the front room, pulling a scarf off the table as she passed it. She loved the passage of scarves in the air – like flowers or spurts of blood.

She popped in a CD. It started with slow, ponderous, unhappy sounds!

_You see me now a veteran of a thousand psychic wars…_

Torment! Bad tidings! Omen! She squealed and pushed the button that made songs change. The little disc swirled behind its window and stopped, something more soothing playing. Ah, no, it was just a bad shuffle selection.

Drusilla is not so silly that she believes songs can be portents. They are just songs, beauty to embroider her endless black satin life.

She smiled and wrapped the gauzy scarf around her nude form, dancing across the small space. Yes, even here, she could feel the stars. They couldn’t be shut out by smog and smoke and thick brick walls. They would have their say, will-ye or nay.

_I know you’ll soon be married, and you want to know where love comes from…_

She twirled, opening her arms to the ceiling, inviting the light and knowledge of the stars into her embrace.

A fairy was beating its wings against the door. Silly fairy – that was a bad way to get one’s wings clipped. Drusilla opened the door and frowned at the fairy, who turned out to be a skinny girl with bright, quick eyes. “Oh. You’re not Spike,” the tasty girl said.

“And you’re not eaten yet.” Drusilla cocked her head, “Bluebird. Pretty, pretty blue…” she had a sudden image of the darkest indigo curling along the girls’ cheeks and into her hair, she reached to touch the pretty tendrils, but the girl flinched back.

“Who are you? Look, just tell Spike to call me when he…”

“Dru! Step away from her!”

Drusilla frowned and turned away from the nummy morsel in the doorway to find Spike staggering toward her from the bed, the blood-stained sheet wrapped around his waist. He looked even nummier than he had last night, all disheveled and despoiled, skin and sheet alike. She purred, sauntering toward him. “My prince awakens.”

But her prince grasped her cruelly, pulling her to him and shouting past her, “Fred, get out of here. She’s mad and I can’t control her.”

The little bird did not flee, but stepped into the room. “Oh my god, Spike, you’re hurt!”

Drusilla keened for the stars. How could her prince be so cruel to her?

He shook her. “Dru, you are NOT to hurt Fred. Do you understand? I don’t want to kill you but if you touch her I will have to.”

Little Bluebird watched them with quick small movements, seeing too much and not seeing at all. Drusilla started to laugh, but Spike shook her again.

“Why? Why, sweet William? Cage a princess to save a bluebird!”

“I am serious, pet. Can I trust you?”

Drusilla sank in his arms, letting all her weight fall on him. Her scarf made slippery patches between their bare flesh that adhered as flesh always does, uncaring for emotion. “He says ‘can’ when he means ‘will’,” she murmured. “My prince has abandoned me.”

“No, love, I’m still right here,” Spike said, in that way he had of not understanding a word she said. He guided her to the couch and moved the pillow from the end to tuck under her arms. She took it, but still felt lonely and sad. The stars were gone, leaving only a ceiling above them, and a dirty ceiling at that.

Spike was leading the bluebird-girl now by the wrist. “Dru, this is Fred. Fred, I’d like you to meet Drusilla, my, well, my sire.”

Which wasn’t right at all, and she glared at him to let him know this. Daddy was ‘sire’. She was his princess, his lady, his darling and pet.

“Don’t you want to get dressed?”

Drusilla thought this was very funny and laughed. Spike draped more of her scarves over her, laying the large sequined one in her lap. “I, Fred, sorry, vampires, you know, got the modesty of hummingbirds.”

“Hello, I guess. Not used to meeting vampire’s family.” The bird-girl held out a hand.

Drusilla wondered if she shouldn’t just bite it, seeing as it was given so nicely, but it didn’t look like it would be more than a taste, the skinny thing, so she frowned at the boney hand. “Fred is a boy’s name,” she said.

“Well, so is Drew,” the bluebird girl said.

Spike hovered nearby, looking anxious. “You have to promise me, Fred, not a word of this gets back to Angel. He’d kill her.”

“You’re a vampire, aren’t you?” Fred asked. When Drusilla nodded, she added, “And I’m going to take a guess and say you don’t have a soul, do you?”

Drusilla made a face. Souls were nasty things, and anyway, clearly popular with boys. She didn’t bother with boys’ things.

“Let me get some clothes on,” Spike said, as if he suddenly didn’t like standing there wrapped in a sheet. “Fred? Dru? Just…” he spread his hands out, “Just be good, all right? Four seconds.”

He backed into the bedroom area, and looked funny searching for a place to dress where he couldn’t be seen from the sitting room. Drusilla covered her mouth to keep the giggle fairies in – they could carry away your heart and then where would you be?

The bluebird girl with the boy name was staring at her as though she could read all her secrets in her eyes. Drusilla quickly dropped her hands and made her face a mask. “I’m a princess,” she informed her.

Fred asked, “Why would Spike call Angel his sire, and also you? What does ‘sire’ mean, exactly? Isn’t it simply the vampire who makes you a vampire?”

Drusilla wrinkled her nose. “That’s a very silly question.”

“Is it? What should I ask?”

“You ought to ask me why I see blue in your face and hair, little bird.”

“All right, I’m ready,” Spike came into the room still pulling his t-shirt over his head, and he was breathing heavily. “Fred, c’mon, let’s, uh, let’s get a cup of coffee or something? Dru, darling, will you be all right on your own?”

“It should be perfectly obvious I won’t,” she admonished him, but he just nodded.

Sometimes, Spike didn’t understand much of anything.

He took the delicate wrist of the bird-girl – so delicate but it could crush cars, oh Dru couldn’t wait to see that – and led her out the door.

As they passed it, Fred said, “Your lock is broken.”

“Don’t let anyone inside, petal,” Spike said. “Guard the house, yeah?”

Drusilla sat back on the sofa and tried to decide if she was going to be very cross, indeed.


	5. Chapter Four: Love and Lychee

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> More Spru!
> 
> Or, rather, more Spike and Fred, since that's the majority of this chapter. :D

“She’s not quite there,” Spike said, closing the apartment door behind him. “Traumatic childhood culminating in being one of Angelus’ special projects.”

Fred crossed her arms. “So explain to me why you have a crazy vampire in your apartment and bite-marks on your neck?”

Spike immediately reached for his neck. “Bollocks. Look, she’s, well, she’s my problem, yeah?”

Fred didn’t move an inch. “Your problem that bites and has no moral code.”

Spike fidgeted with his neck, and then with the broken lock, trying to see if he could secure it. “Look, I need to get some blood from the market. And probably a new lock. You can come along if you want, but all I’m going to tell you is that Dru is my problem and the poof had damn well better not find out or I’ll sneak into your bedroom, little Miss Winifred, and snap the heads off all your dolls.”

“Oh you would not!”

“Try me.” Spike rubbed his fingers on his jean-clad thigh and started up the stairs.

Golden Harvest Market was just four doors down, and Spike led the way in an practiced dance from awning to door-front to awning, arriving unscathed under the yellow and red canopy covered in Korean and Chinese characters.

Fred smiled at the familiar smells of the Asian grocery – dried fish and soy and earthy vegetables. “You get blood here?” She eyed a hand-lettered sign promising “Very Good Lychee”.

“I get everything here. I’m a captive audience when the sun’s up; still, Mrs. Park does all right. Don’t you, love?” Spike turned his best Eddie-Haskel-esque flirtatious grin on an older woman in a green apron.

“Shush, Vampire,” Mrs. Park said, waving her hand at him. “You gonna have to wait. I have living customers here.”

“Mrs. Park is madly in love with me,” Spike smirked. “I’m going into the back, Mrs. P – see if you have any locks?”

The old woman just waved at him again before picking up a basket of cabbages and shouting in Korean to a bored stock boy who took the longest time possible coming to take it from her.

Fred followed Spike as he wove his way expertly through the narrow aisles of the grocery. They came into a darker back room that smelled more of oil and metal than food. Stacks of dishware and silver woks filled the shelves. “You never know what they’ll have back here,” Spike said, eyes scanning the shelves. “Ah. See what I mean?” He reached up and snatched a paper and plastic package from a high shelf. He turned to show Fred it contained a chain lock. “Home security once again.”

“Which is all very well and good, Spike, but you still have a vampire in your apartment!”

He rolled his eyes. “I always have a vampire in my apartment: me.”

“No you don’t. Spike!” She was sure he was trying to lose her in the aisles. “Damn it. We have to talk about this. What are you doing with her?”

“The hokey pokey. Come on, I’ll get you some of those wasabi peanuts.”

“Are you in love with her?”

He stopped dead in the aisle of pot-noodles. He turned. “Yeah,” he said, as if just realizing it. “I’ll always love her.”

“But she’s evil.”

Fred frowned at the sour look Spike gave her. He stalked to the front of the store and grabbed a bag of green-coated peanuts, which he tossed back at her. “Love doesn’t think. You love a serial killer, that’s it. You know it’s wrong, but the heart goes on loving. That’s all there is. There’s nothing Dru could do that can change the fact that she killed me, once, and at the same time saved me.” He shook his head and stepped past Fred. “Come on, we have to wait at the meat counter.”

“Is she killing? Spike? Spike, turn around and look me in the eye and tell me she isn’t killing people and eating them while living under your roof.”

Spike turned with a heavy sigh and lowered eyes. “Think she did in a bloke a few days before running into me, yeah. But she’s promised, not while I’m taking care of her. She won’t kill.”

“I know I’m looking a reformed vampire in the eyes as I say this, Spike, so don’t give me an eye-roll or a scowl when I say this; you can’t just reform a vampire.”

“She’s not just ‘a vampire’.” He glanced behind him to see if the stout man behind the meat counter knew he was there. Then his eyes roved everywhere but back to Fred, who watched him steadily. “She… she’s always had a sort of innocence about her. I mean, she didn’t choose to be a monster. Angelus drove her out of her raving little brain before he turned her. She was strong, I like to think, withstood him and his evil little mind games. She was going to commit herself to a nunnery, at the end. Tells you something – how important doing right was for her. Poor girl. If she’d only known, that was like pouring honey on top for Angelus. He always had a stiffy for the church.”

“So you think she can be redeemed? Spike, does she even want to be?”

“She’s not right in the head,” Spike said, keeping his attention on the meat counter. The butcher nodded at him and was setting plastic soup containers on the scale. “The way I figure it, she has a better chance than I had, coming to the light, because it isn’t all her fault on account of insanity. I don’t think she even knows that she kills people.”

“Well, okay. If that’s the case, shouldn’t this be handled by the firm?”

Spike turned and gaped at her. “No.”

“But if anyone knows how to handle mental illness in the paranormal, well, heck, it’s got to be someone working with, for, or against Wolfram and Hart.”

“The last time Angel saw her, he set her on fire. No fuckin’ Wolfram and Hart. Thanks,” he said this last to the butcher as he reached up to take two pint containers of blood. “Come on, we pay up front.”

Fred guiltily realized she’d been snacking on the peanuts for a while and would be purchasing half a bag. “So you’re saying you want to take on the reformation and therapy of a mentally ill homicidal vampire, all on your own, secretly, without help?”

“That’s about the size of it. Um… got any ones, Fred?” Spike fumbled with his wallet while a teen with pink-streaked hair placed his blood containers in a plastic bag with the chain-lock.

Once he’d paid and gotten change, he led Fred across the street – a quick dash – to a Starbucks and the promised coffee.

After ordering, and Spike patting the smoke from his hair, Fred said, “Well, okay, and I’m not saying that I’m helping you with this, but what kind of crazy is she, exactly? Is she delusional? Phobic? Paranoid?”

“She sees things. And that’s not crazy – she has the sight, all right? But she has trouble telling what’s real and what’s something happened a century ago and what’s next week’s news.”

They got a seat near the back, where it was dark. Spike pulled the top off his venti mocha caramelo whatevero latte, took a big gulp to lower the level and poured blood into it. Fred grimaced. “And I thought the espresso shots were gross.”  
  
He shrugged. “So, you have some science advice for dealing with Dru’s problems?”

“Well, I’m told you’re supposed to get them to talk it out – to intellectualize their hallucinations and deal with them that way. Like, is it logical that worms are crawling on the walls, or is it logical that I am having an hallucination?”

“Funny, love. I’ve been doing that with her for decades. Sometimes it helps. Sometimes, too, she gets these fits – sudden emotion, she can’t control it and she’s just like the world’s biggest toddler. So many things she can’t handle on her own. She gets overwhelmed, like.”

“Well, I don’t know much, I mean, I took anthropology as my social sciences elective – and let me tell you, that was way less useful preparation for living in a cave than you might think.”

“I wouldn’t think it would be useful at all.”

“Yeah, now halve that.”

They smiled at each other. Spike set down his coffee-blood-latte. “Just promise me, Fred, please. Don’t mention anything to Angel. If I need help, I’ll ask for it.”

“Well, the whole reason I came over today, Spike, is that we’ve all noticed you’re not coming around. What am I supposed to say?”

“Say I’ve got a new girl.” Spike shrugged.

Fred stood up. “I’ll help you, Spike,” she said, with a determined set of her chin. “Don’t you dare make me regret this!”

He stood and took her hand. “You’re a true friend, you are,” he said, and kissed her knuckles.

“You just get away with everything because you’re charming,” she chided, and waved farewell.

***

Spike paused to examine the door before entering his apartment again. He pulled the hanging strike-plate off and pushed the door open. “Dru? Kitten?”

“Psss!” Drusilla stood, arms crossed. She’d changed into her dark red dress. “Hiss growl!”

“Not in a good mood, are we?” He passed her to set the shopping bag on the table. He took out the lock and turned it over in his hands, frowning at it.

“I was not going to eat the bluebird.” Dru stomped one delicate foot. “She gets eaten from the inside and then swallows whole worlds; I saw it in her lips.”

“Sorry, petal. You just startled me, is all, waking up and you standing over sweet innocent little Fred.”

“I wasn’t!”

“You’re a vampire. She’s human. I have to be cautious. Be good while I fix this door up, and we’ll go get you a new dolly, all right?”

“You mock me!’ She stomped again. “I’m not a little girl to be bought off with a dolly.”

Spike crouched by the door, holding the new chain-lock here and there, trying to decide where to mount it between the old damaged locks and the broken bits of wood. “Two dollies, then. And some cards, eh? Wes told me there’s an occult bookstore not five blocks from here.”

Drusilla considered this, but shook her head. A point must be made! (And William would buy her presents anyway. She knew him too well.) “You’ve been so long with a leash around your neck you’ve forgotten what it is not to have one.”

Spike turned to her. He was on one knee, the lock balanced on his thigh with its attendant parts. “It’s not a leash, pet. Not like that.”

“I’m not a dog straining at its chain so that it would sink its teeth into the first flesh that passes,” Dru said, head held high. “Naughty Spike, to doubt me so.”

“I’m sorry, Dru. But I honestly can’t tell how much of what I say you understand.”

She frowned at him. “Everything!” she said, and stomped to the dinette chair. She lowered herself into it like a queen alighting her throne. “I’m not a very small girl, you know. I understand everything you say. I know what a white hat is. AND why you wear one. Silly Spike, I know better than you do!”

Spike blinked, suddenly feeling it was very appropriate, his kneeling before her. “I’m sorry, Dru. I underestimated you. Shouldn’t treat you like that; like a monster. I know how that feels.” He dropped the lock and moved closer to her, taking her hands. “Not having a soul doesn’t mean not having sense, or understanding. I promise, love, not to treat you like they treated me, when I sought redemption. Not anymore.”

Drusilla raised her chin imperiously. “And what sort of dolly will you bring me? It must be a pretty one with curly hair.”

He dropped his head and bit his lip to suppress a chuckle. “Whatever you want, kitten,” he said, brushing his thumbs over the backs of her hands.

She rewarded him with a kiss. “You are my white knight,” she said. “No matter how you try to be anything else, you can’t.”


	6. Chapter Five: Dru's Grand Day Out

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Dru's Grand Day Out! :)
> 
> Okay, I particularly like this chapter. It raises some... issues with Spike and Dru's relationship. That's all I'm going to say. :P

Spike was rescuing.

The very small phone he kept in his pocket exploded in a delightful electronic music, like mice had a discotheque in his jeans and it made her dance and clap.

But then he had talked very fast and angry with the bluebird girl with the boy’s name, and said he had to go, right away, and didn’t know when he would be back.

She could understand that; he was the most dashing knight in the kingdom, and so rescues had to happen. He thought she didn’t understand that, silly boy. There were damsels and tasty morsels aplenty in danger from darker things in the night than her.

Oh, but that was a delicious thought, and she couldn’t help but wrap her diaphanous cloak around her and slip out into the night.

She left her shoes at home because she was being sneaky, and her delicate toes padded kitten-quiet through the broken glass and weed-choked sidewalks.

The stars guided her, disguised, as they were wont to do, as traffic lights and turn-signals. But she knew which ones were stars, playing hooky from the sky, and which were just lights blinking at her for no reason.

At least she _thought_ she did. They could be tricky, her stars.

But no, this time they were not false, but led her right to a bright and happy place, pulsing with a purple glow and the heat of many bodies crushed together. Supplicants wishing to worship at the temple were lined up inside a velvet rope, holding their offerings of tiny silver evening bags and cell phones.

Drusilla, of course, was a princess, not a supplicant, and so went straight to the head of the line and leaned over the muscular young man to decipher the runes on his clipboard. “Pst, pst,” she said, “The stars led me to you. Is it a party?”

“Are you high? Back of the line.” He glanced at her toes. “And proper footwear required, lady. Jeeezus.”

Drusilla pouted. “I am a princess and purple is one of my favorite colors of parties.”

“I don’t care if you’re the Queen of Sheba, if you ain’t on the list…”

So Drusilla took his mind away from him – just a little – pushed it down like a baby in the bathwater, and, giggling, stepped around him into the party.

The fairies were all there! Disguising themselves as disco lights and confetti, they danced around the periphery, singing of earthly folly and dead kings.

She started in to a country dance she had learned in her youth, though it required a partner and she had none, it was fun to set and turn about the dance floor, purple and green lights flashing up at her between her toes.

“Hey, you’re hot! Oo, scratch that, baby, you’re ice cold!” Human hands encircled her waist, radiating heat. She spun and stepped away, like a nymph leading a hero she waved her scarf at him. He followed, of course, holding his hands up at his sides and wiggling his hips as he went, as was the ritual dance of his tribe.

***

Spike was consumed with relief when his building came into view. All night and day he’d been anxious, worrying about Dru being left on her own, worrying about Angel smelling Dru, and then of course there was the actual mission-du-jour and helpless tykes to rescue. It was a wonder he’d been able to concentrate enough to put ax-end toward demon-neck. He swung his heavy ax up onto his shoulder and unlocked the street door, stepping into the dreary, but familiar halls of his apartment building, somehow sure now that the stained and banged-up green linoleum was underfoot, everything would be all right.

At the base of the stairs to the basement he saw his door was wide open. “Bugger-fucking hell,” he groaned, and ran the last few feet, though surely it wouldn’t make a difference.

The TV and Playstation were gone, a clean spot in the dust on their little table all the evidence of their existence. He dropped the ax on the couch and gripped his head. “Dru!”

She wafted in like a butterfly from the bedroom, holding a gypsy scarf stretched over her head like a veil held against rain. “Hark! My prince returns after so long a trial!”

“Drusilla. You left the door open. Someone’s stolen the mother-loving telly! I don’t have a lot of stuff to steal, pet!”

She let go of the scarf and it floated down her hair to the ground. “Well, that was while I was out, Spike. I couldn’t stay here all the night, and the lock only works from the inside.”

He rubbed between his eyes and for a while was unable to formulate a response while she watched him, hands clasped behind her back and leaning forward in eager anticipation. Oh lord, he thought, she wants me to spank her. “This being you, I am, of course, relieved and impressed you even noticed the lock. Pet, I meant for you to stay in until I got back. We discussed this. How’m I to know you’re not eating people?”

She skipped up to him. “I drank,” she said, coyly, and danced away. “Champaign!”

“Oh, Dru.” He sank onto the sofa next to the ax. “Look at your feet!” They were filthy, black on the bottoms, scratched, and marked with dried blood from tiny cuts.

She skipped around the room, presumably acting out her dance of the previous evening. “But it wasn’t like the Champaign we had in Paris, Spike. Not at all. That was starlight and jewels made into bubbles. This was more like something made from grapes. Oh, but it still tickled my nose and made the dear boy taste sweet!”

He jumped up, the ax bouncing on the cushion from his motion and falling with a clunk to the floor. “A boy. You tasted a boy?” He grabbed her arm and spun her around to face him. “Drusilla, did you eat someone?”

“Only tasted,” she pouted. “And he fell asleep in the bathtub,” she pointed at the bathroom door with a sulky frown.

“Oh god.” Spike ran his sweating palms through his hair again. “Fell asleep could mean anything with you.” He threw open the bathroom door and was greeted with the sight of a great lunk of a frat-boy slouched against the back wall of the shower stall. He was easily identified as a frat boy, or else he’d stolen the beer- and vomit-stained Zeta Beta Tau t-shirt. His wide, dark jeans were pulled down to expose paisley boxers and his limp dick, and he was snoring fit to shake the fixtures loose.

“Alive,” Spike sighed, catching himself against the door-frame in relief. He inhaled again. “And drunk, and… Drusilla!”

“Hm?” She looked up from examining the ax on the floor.

Spike’s face felt numb with rage. “You fucked this… this git?”

She raised herself onto tiptoe, her hands clasped under her chin. “Oh.” She pursed her lips. “Only a little.”

“I – can… can I not expect you to understand that when I have sex with you, I rather hope you aren’t having sex with other men?”

“I didn’t eat him!” She pouted. “I wanted to. His blood is so loud; it was practically begging to jump out of him as he danced.” She stomped one delicate, dirt-stained foot. “If I can’t eat the pretty boys, I must have some pleasure from them!”

Spike held his head as though afraid it was going to crack open. “So you’re telling me I can have you faithful, or good, but not at the same time?” He leaned his back against the doorjamb. “I’m the bleedin’ knight in the Wife of Bath’s tale.”

“You were always my knight,” Drusilla smiled like a teacher seeing her student has finally solved a difficult problem. She kissed him on the nose.

Spike sighed and turned to face the bathroom. “Oi!” He slammed the bathroom door hard into the wall. “Arse-wipe! Get up! Man of the flat wants a bleedin’ shower!” When that didn’t work he stepped forward and kicked his foot. “UP!”

The frat boy snorted and flailed to waking, blinking blearily at Spike. “Wha? Huh?”

“I said get your arse up, or I’m turning the shower on anyway, and the water comes out brown at first which would stain your pathetic clothes and serve you bleedin’ right you Neanderthal ass-picking pillock!”

The frat boy grabbed on to the towel-rail over his head and stared at Spike with some concern now. “Oh god, somebody’s yellin’ at me in British.”

“It’s ENGLISH, you moron. And in case you hadn’t figured it out, I’m the boyfriend of the trollop you shagged last night.”

“Oh. Oh fuck.”

“Yeah.” Spike nodded exaggeratedly, looming menacingly over the prone college student. “The realization dawns. Now get your pants up, Doogie. I can’t bear looking at your pathetic todger.”

Dru poked her head over Spike’s shoulder. “Are you not going to kill him? Not even a tiny bit?”

Spike turned and placed his hand on Drusilla’s sternum. He backed her into the living area. “Drusilla, pet, you did not orchestrate this whole thing in the hopes that it would drive me to kill a man, did you?”

She bit her forefinger and giggled.

“Don’t be laughing about this, now. I want the truth.” His voice cracked a little. “Because you can’t do this, Dru. You can’t be testing me or trying to pull me to the dark side. This whole arrangement, me and you, it’s about bringing _you_ into the light. That’s the only way this works.”

“You’re all rules with a soul,” she said, twisting and pouting prettily. “Rules are no fun unless you’re breaking them.”

“I’m not going to kill anyone, so get it out of your silly head right now,” Spike said, pointing firmly at the ground.

Behind him, a man coughed. “Uh, look, uh, she didn’t tell me she was with anybody, okay?”

Spike faced him only long enough to say, “Out, you daft nit,” and marched over to sit on his couch and face his not-a-telly.

The frat boy exhibited uncharacteristic (thus far) wisdom and simply slipped out the door, holding up his over-large pants to speed his escape.

After a suitable silence had passed and Drusilla had stopped grumbling, Spike set his chin on his hand and sighed. “From the top: don’t leave the door unlocked, we live in a shit-hole and people will walk in and steal things. Got it?”

Petulantly, she nodded.

“Secondly.” He sighed. “Please don’t fuck random men. Or any men who aren’t me. And don’t eat anyone.” She began to look about to cry. He ducked his head. “You – you’re doing real great, pet, other than that. Haven’t killed anyone, that’s good. I am glad you knew there was a lock, petal. And I believe you; that you just wanted to have good, non-eating fun. But wear shoes when you go outside. You need a bath worse than I do, and I have demon blood under my nails.”

He felt like the grumpy, uptight father of a spoilt teen as she danced over and kissed his forehead.

“I thought it was demons you didn’t like me sleeping with,” she said, with a thoughtful frown.

“No, it’s men. Any men.”

“Or else it was just horns. You went on and on about Jared’s antlers.”

Spike blinked. “That thing was named ‘Jared’? No, never mind. ‘Course he was. Probably a public aid worker with a condo in Poughkeepsie. Men, kitten. I want to be the only one.”

She sank onto the couch beside him, an arm trailing over his shoulders. “No men at all, then?”

“If it wouldn’t be too much to ask, yeah, no men at all.”

“What about women?”

He laughed, covering his eyes. “Yeah, all right. You can sleep with women. See, I’m not so square, am I?”

Drusilla hummed happily and Spike relaxed back on the sofa, closing his eyes. He was exhausted, all the fight and the tension coming back to him now the immediate threat and fight was past. He fell asleep right there.

Drusilla tucked her scarf around her sleeping prince and gave him a kiss on his dear forehead, which was much prettier when it didn’t have those frowny wrinkles on it. Then she went to the door and shut it, fastening the lock for the night. She picked up another scarf that had somehow fallen onto the floor and noticed that her feet were all dirty.

Treacherous pixies! They must have gotten to her toes while she was sitting down. She waved a finger to scold them and tripped merrily into the shower to clean herself.


	7. Chapter Six: Angel Has An Opinion

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> More madcap fun! In this chapter, well, the inevitable happens!

Spike stood in the doll aisle of the all-night discount store, frowning seriously at the selection. Whoever this Barbie chit was, her mum should die of embarrassment. Who knew they were making little whore dolls for the kiddies these days?

He threw down yet another leggy, vapid blonde and stalked to the other end of the aisle, which looked less violently pink. There were baby-dolls here, at least, but none of them looked, well, properly Drusilla-ish.

Girls’ toy selection had turned to utter shit since he’d broken up with her last time. Well, he’d had fewer scruples, too, which meant breaking into boutiques and vintage shops where all the most expensive antique dolls could be got. He seemed to recall, actually, that the last doll he’d gotten her was from FOA Schwartz on Fifth Avenue in New York. It was a marvy little china flapper with exaggeratedly long limbs, a brown velvet dress and a feather boa. He’d brought it back to her as a souvenir, after he’d killed Nikki Wood.

It was buggerdly complicated, emotionally, reminiscing about past times with Dru.

He was examining a sailor-suited doll-baby who was almost appropriate – she had a porcelain-like whiteness to her, at least, when someone cleared his throat loudly behind him. He dropped the doll like it was on fire and turned to see Angel standing there, a yellow plastic shopping basket clasped in front of him.

“Hey, wow, fancy meeting you here,” Angel said, with flat inflection.

“Are you… did you have me followed?”

Angel glanced up at the ceiling. “No, Spike, I thought I’d swing by the toy section of Big Lots for, I don’t know, plastic weapons?”

“Can the sarcasm, Peaches. I don’t stalk your law office, why are you stalking me?”

“Just curious why you’re suddenly in the market for a new dolly.”

Spike smirked. “Why? Wanna trade?”

“No. Want to tell me why Fred is researching anti-psychotics for the undead?” Angel raised his eyebrows expectantly.

Spike scratched behind his ear and tried to find something to look at in the vapid array of doll faces. “I don’t, uh, know anything about Fred’s extracurriculars.”

“Spike, I’m not an idiot.”

“Oh,” Spike shook his head with a chuckle, “is that ever in contention!”

“Where is Drusilla?”

“Dunno. Spain, maybe?”

Angel tossed his shopping basket aside and closed the distance between them. “Stop playing around, Spike. She’s dangerous and unstable and I don’t know why you’re helping her.”

Spike raised his chin. “Right. I should just forget she exists, right? Ignore her killing. She likes little children, Angelus, you remember? Likes to dress the little girls up and play with them like dollies until she breaks them. Oh, but it wasn’t happening around me, so where’s the harm? Out of sight and all that. Should I let that be a balm to my _soul_?”

Angel’s eyes narrowed and he knew he’d hit his mark. “I was too weak to kill her, but I tried. You think you can, what? Reform her? Make her a productive member of society?”

Spike dropped his shoulders, and took a step back. “Why not? Come on, Angel; look at us! Is it that far-fetched?”

“Uh, yeah. It is.”

“You’re so quick to give up hope on her. You son of a bitch.” Spike scowled. “You MADE her like that. You know, knew, the girl she once was. The girl she could be again.”

Angel looked away. “That girl is dead, Spike. She’s never coming back. I made sure of that.”

Spike set his jaw and clenched his fists. “Don’t pull that with me.”

He was rewarded with a blink of surprise. “I’m not pulling anything, Spike. It’s the truth. I mean, god, I wish it wasn’t.”

“No one knows this better than I do, Angelus. I know what you did, and I know how you worked. I was one of your projects too, once, and I got better.”

“You were barely a project. If I’d really focused on you, boy, you’d be as broken as she is. So don’t tell me you know what I am capable of.”

“Bugger off. This isn’t about you. I had no soul, and I chose to change, to become a better man.”

“You had no choice.”

“I had love.” Spike stepped back and made a gesture like throwing something at Angel’s feet. “There’s no motivation stronger than that. Nothing makes men of beasts but love.”

Angel snorted. “You’re serious.”

“I won’t let you hurt her. She’s going to get better. She’s going to be good. White hat. You’ll see. Without the torture of a soul. She can do it, if her mind lets her.”

“Now you’re trying to pull one past me. I know redemption, Spike. It’s where I’ve lived for one hundred years. You don’t get it, without a soul. You know that as well as I do.”

Spike stepped forward. Their faces were mere inches apart. “The fucking hell I don’t. I turned to good, on my own, with no hope to benefit from it, long before I _sought_ my soul.” He put an extra sharp emphasis on “sought”, glaring at Angel to deny the worthiness of that. “Looking back, I’d even say I turned to the light long before I realized I had. Put that in your self-flagellation kit and smoke it.”

Late-night shoppers were peering down the toy aisle, dragging kids away from it and exchanging glances as the two men faced off surrounded by dolls, their voices rising.

“You really want to have this out, right now? Fine. You stumbled on redemption, Spike. You tripped and accidentally fell into it, for all the wrong reasons. You took a path so screwed up it could ONLY have happened to you and it will NEVER happen again. Not to Dru, not to anyone.”

Spike rotated his shoulders as though loosening up for a fight. “Yeah, okay. I started out changing because I wanted something in return; I wanted Buffy to like me, hell, even just to tolerate me.”

“It was the chip. You had to play nice or starve.”

“Bollocks! ‘The chip!’ I wanted to be worthy. Accepted. You going to tell me that’s less meaningful that a sodding curse you only got because you were even more a rotten bastard than the average vampire?”

“I’m not playing ‘whose soul is shinier’, Spike. Think about what you just said.” Angel dropped his shoulders, defenses down. “Could anyone, even Buffy, have forced you to walk that path, if it didn’t come from within you?”

“She wants to change.”

“Do you know that, really know that?”

Spike fell out of his fighting stance. It made him look instantly smaller, more vulnerable. “She said so, Angel. She said she’d do it, for me. For love.”

Angel looked down, sadly. “You’ve really got to get rid of that neon sign on your Achilles’ heel.”

“No. She means it, Angel. She does. And I mean it too. We still love each other. Souls aren’t as strong as that.”

Angel took a step back, turning halfway. “We’ll put her in a holding cell at Wolfram and Hart.”

“No!”

“It’s the only way I can be sure. The only way I’ll let you do this.”

“You’re out of your flippin’ gourd. She doesn’t need to be locked up!”

Angel smiled sadly. “Technically, she should have been locked up a century ago. It won’t be bad. We’ll furnish it; make it cozy. She’ll get psychiatric treatment. You know, Fred found all this research from the Watcher’s council on treating insane vampires. Or driving vampires insane.” He shook his head. “Think we needed another reason to hate the watchers?”

“She won’t do it. Not like that. These things take trust, Peaches. You’d know that if you weren’t such a berk. I won’t lock her up. She hasn’t killed anyone since living with me, and no chains holding her back, either.”

“I’ll give you four days to bring her to us, Spike. After that, the gloves come off, and we come and get her.” Angel turned and walked away.

***

Drusilla could tell something was bothering her Spike. He’d hardly looked at her since coming home with a new dolly. He hadn’t looked at the dolly, either, which she had announced was named Miss Carrie, and she was sitting proudly on top of the refrigerator because Miss Carrie liked to have a view of the world.

On the sofa, Spike looked at his own fingertips, pressed together before him almost like prayer. “Pet? How would you feel about, well, about visiting Daddy?”

Drusilla looked over her shoulder, frowning. She went back to arranging Miss Carrie’s feet. She’d had shoes on before, but Drusilla had taken them off. Carrie did not wear shoes because she was a wild and unruly child. “Is this a game?” she asked.

“No, princess. It’s Angel. I sort of ran into him, and he’d like to see you.”

Dru turned on her toe, graceful as a ballerina. She was wearing an off-white lace gown, a wedding gown, actually, that Spike had found for her in a resale shop. It swayed against her legs as she crossed the room. “Oh no. We never visit the Angel beast! Grandmummy went to him and what horrible things took her!” She knelt before Spike, her hands on his knees, and looked at him very seriously. “She grew a baby that doesn’t exist anymore and suffered for its tiny spark until she could love living less than it.”

“Not the time for cryptic, love.” He put his hands on hers, thumbs rubbing gently over her knuckles. “What if I told you he wasn’t angry, wasn’t mad, and only wanted to help you.”

Drusilla pursed her lips. “You’re putting me on. That’s not nice.”

“No, sweetness, I’m really not. Angel wants to help you be more like me. Make it easier, yeah, to keep all these rules of mine. So we, you and I, can be together.”

“Angel. Wants to help us be together.” She tilted her head at him with one of her startlingly lucid “you’re mad” expressions.

“I won’t force you to go, but if you do, I’ll be there with you. I’ll protect you.”

She raised her hand to trace his face. “Always protecting me from Daddy,” she said. “When I didn’t want you to.”

“Please, love,” he winced away from her touch, which made her frown. He shook his head, gathered up her hands and raised them to his lips, kissing them both until her frown melted into a beatific smile. “Please, love. Come with me to see Angel. To help you get better.”

“I remember this game. Bad Daddy! I get to play all I want so long as Daddy stays alive for the ritual!”

“Not like that. We’re just going to talk. We’re all on the same side again, love. Our family is all together good now, what’s left of it. Don’t you want to be a family again?”

Drusilla looks like she has something sour in her mouth. “Not with the Angel-beast.”

Spike sighed, letting go of her hands. “Well,” he said, “We have four days.”


	8. Chapter Seven: Girl Talk

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> In this chapter, Fred returns and gets to discuss things with Dru. Also, Gunn steps in to help out!

Fred sat down at the Starbucks across from Drusilla, who Spike had already set down with her own cup and teapot (which Fred strongly suspected did not, in fact, contain any tea.)

“Fred, you have my cell number. I won’t be too far. You ladies have a good time.” Spike backed away, hands out toward them as though afraid he’d have to jump forward any second.

Drusilla gave him an indulgent smirk and leaned her cheek toward him. He seemed confused for a moment, then said, “Oh, right,” and leaned forward to give her a peck. “Have your girl-chat,” he said. “And let me know if you need anything.”

Fred shook her head as he gave her an anxious look before backing his way to the exit of the coffee shop, bumping in to three people on his way.

“I don’t think he likes leaving you alone,” Fred laughed.

“He thinks I’m going to eat all the lovely people,” Drusilla said. She poured liquid the color of berry-juice into her cup. “My Spike wouldn’t let me leave our home until I’d eaten my fill, just to be sure.” Drusilla hummed in a pleased way that was disturbing, as though remembering her meal. “He doesn’t trust anything these days, not even shadows.”

Fred said, “Oh-kay.” She twisted her coffee cup between her hands. “I admit, I’m not really into this ‘girl time’ stuff. All my best friends have always been guys, like since I was five. I suppose it didn’t help in high school that I was in chess club and physics club. Um…” She took a sip of coffee, unnerved by the attentive stare she was getting from Drusilla. Her eyes looked shallow, like there was nothing behind them. “Do you… do this a lot?”

Drusilla pursed her lips and shook her head. Then she frowned and nodded. “We have tea every day, in our nicest dresses, if the girls behave, but so many are naughty and need punished for talking out of turn,” she amended, and took a dainty sip of whatever it was.

“Riiight,” Fred said, and bit her lip.

***

“Would you stop pacing?”

“’M all right.” Spike chewed away at the side of one nail. “’S just – never left Dru alone with someone like this. Not since I bleedin’ cared, you know, if the nummy treats survived.”

Gunn leaned back and gestured with his binoculars. “Yeah, well, hence the stake-out. Which you are blowing with your neon white ass passing the window every twenty seconds. Sit down!”

Spike’s ass touched a chair for all of a second before he was on his feet again, running his hand through his hair. “I’m trying to trust her. That’s the scary thing. I wonder if… what if Buffy and her friends had trusted me? Back when I first wanted them to. I think it over and I wonder if it still would have worked, you know? Maybe, yeah, it’s the dog’s bollocks and I’m Mr. Hero a year ahead of schedule, adored by Buffy, no soul makin’ me barmy, and all is fantastic in the world. Willy’s bar isn’t destroyed. But maybe I don’t try as hard, see, maybe I needed all that pushing. Having no reason to prove myself, I just slack off, and maybe I end up still evil, even to bleedin’ today. Maybe the First Evil wins, hell on earth is established, and maybe I wouldn’t even _care_ …”

“Man if you don’t shut up, I’m going to duct tape you and Angel together and make you watch the surveillance tape. You want that?”

Spike finally sat down. He fidgeted with a small hole in his jeans and watched over Gunn’s smooth head. Across the street and one floor below, Fred and Drusilla sat in the picture window of the coffee house, looking so very normal from this distance, two girlfriends, one perhaps a bit flamboyantly feminine, but just two women sharing the time.

“I just want to know I’m doing the right thing,” Spike said.

“Hundred years and change,” Gunn shook his head, “and you still haven’t figured out there’s no knowing that? Now sit down, shut up, and let me do this.” He waved the binoculars again. Spike nodded, and set to grimly watching, wishing he had the hookup to the listening device in the teapot. But maybe it was best that Gunn was the one listening in.

***

“I suppose they think that we’ll be able to connect in some girl-way they don’t understand. But really, I’m not much of a girl. I mean, pfft! Hair? Makeup? Harmony starts talking about it and my eyes glaze over.”

“It’s a girl’s privilege to be pretty,” Drusilla said, with the air of reciting.

“Er… okay, new topic. Do you know why Spike wanted me to meet with you?”

“To convince me to go to Daddy. But I told him: I don’t want anything to do with the Angel-beast. He isn’t my daddy anymore. He’s gone mad!”

“Angel’s all right,” Fred said, leaning forward earnestly. “He means well, anyway. Sometimes you can’t tell just what’s going through that head of his, but I know him and trust him. If he says he’s not going to hurt you, he means it.”

Drusilla narrowed her eyes and set down her teacup with a moue of distaste.

“What?”

Drusilla shook her head. “Mustn’t talk about such things at tea. Isn’t civil.”

“No, come on, tell me. Why does Angel bother you so much? It can’t be the soul; Spike has a soul and you don’t mind being with him.” Drusilla’s pout deepened, her chin dimpling as she glanced around the room and fidgeted in distress. “It’s that one time, isn’t it? He set you on fire. I know. But you don’t have to fear that now. I promise. He won’t hurt you.”

“No!” Drusilla said, and stamped her foot under the table.

Fred straightened in her seat in surprise. Spike had warned her Drusilla could be child-like, but this was surreal.

“Daddy said I would be his forever.” Drusilla’s arms snaked around her torso, crossing to hold her shoulders. “He would hold me down and give me delicious pain and fill the empty places. Cold, empty eyes and hearts under the ground. Poor sisters. Never going to rise again, no matter how you call them. Call them to tea. They never come.”

Fred gaped. What was she supposed to do? “It… it’s okay.”

Drusilla seemed to snap into herself again. She looked coldly at Fred. “Daddy doesn’t want his princess anymore. He made me need him and then he took himself away. All I have is my white knight, and he won’t hurt me. Not even a little.”

Fred tilted her head, thinking critically, clinically about this – it was the only way she could. Angel’s past was, well, not the sort of thing she thought about, any more than she dwelled on crazy cave-living in Pylea. She said, “That doesn’t have to be a problem for you if you don’t want it to be. What do you care what Angel does now or what Spike does? You don’t have to define yourself by a man.” Fred watched closely to see if any of this was penetrating. “Maybe it’s a good thing, not to, well, ‘belong’ to him like that anymore. You’re stronger than that. Spike trusts you, and I trust him.”

Drusilla cocked her head as if trying to understand, very gently trying. “I’m his princess. His dark plum to taste and delight.”

“Yeah, okay, but I mean you’re also a vampire in your own right. I mean, you made him, not the other way around. And there’s that super strength! You could pick me right up and snap me like a big ol’ twig! Oh, that… that probably wasn’t the best example to give.”

Drusilla smiled a little smugly and hummed her approval.

“And there’s that seeing the future thing. Heck, Angel can’t do that. No one can do that! Not even Lorne. Well, he can see some things – destinies. But you have a real gift. To heck with Angel! Right? He can just jog out into the sunlight if he wants to; you’ll still be strong and powerful and really, really graceful.”

***

Gunn whistled low. “Fred, honey, I don’t think the woman power speech is really how we want to go with this!”

“What? What’s happening?” Spike hovered over him.

“Ass. Down. They’re just talking. But I think our ‘girl talk’ strategy is working a little too well. I’m picturing the last act of ‘Nine to Five’ with Angel tied up, and I’m not sure where that leaves the rest of us.”

Spike stuck his hands in his pocket. “Dru was always a girls’ girl. Feminine through and through.”

“Right. Feminine. Serial killers are so girly.” Gunn rolled his eyes.

***

“You’re a sweet bluebird, sayin’ such things to a girl like me.” Dru preened, smoothing her hair back.

“Yeah – about that.” Fred fixed her with a stare. “You told me I should ask you why you see blue when you look at me. This future-telling stuff, I’m guessing I shouldn’t let it slide. What is it? What do I have to do or not do?”

“Beware the present unasked. Open the box and it hollows you. Makes you a box for not a very nice present at all. And all the boys cry.”

“Do you have to be real cryptic like that, I mean, really?”

Drusilla nodded, blinking like it was the plainest, most obvious thing in the world.

“Can’t you just say, I dunno, ‘Don’t be home on December fourth’ or something?”

“The fairies don’t like dates and numbers,” Drusilla explained, and frowned. “Which is vexing. If I could just number things, it would be simpler.”

“So I’m going to get a present, a package of some sort, and I should not open it?”

Drusilla leaned over the table, the back of her hand toward her mouth, she whispered, “It’s your coffin!”

Fred grimaced. “I guess that’s a present I won’t want.”

Drusilla shook her head sagaciously.

Gathering her courage, Fred reached across and took the vampire’s slender hand. “Come with me to the office. You can do so much good for us, with your visions. And Angel – well, I’ll make sure he keeps away from you. I promise.”

Drusilla smiled and leaned forward, conspiratorially, and with the same joy a child would use agreeing to play a game of tag, she said, “Yes. Let’s do that!”

***

In the rented hotel room across the street, Gunn fell back with a sigh of relief. “She’s gonna do it,” he said to Spike, who hovered expectantly.

“Yes!” Spike stalked up to the window and raised a fist. “Thatta girl, Fred!”

“Yeah, well, we still have to let Angel know and arrange this whole thing.” Gun started packing up the surveillance equipment. “Why don’t you get down there just in case your girlfriend gets snacky?”

“Right. Yeah.” Spike made a tiny little extra fist-pump and walked to the door, containing his excitement poorly.


	9. Chapter Eight: Drusilla Comes to Daddy’s Castle

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> More Spike/Dru!
> 
> In this chapter, Fred gets to start her studies and, well, another Ex of Spike's comes up.

The key to getting Drusilla to go somewhere, Spike realized belatedly, was not necessarily feminine intervention, as had worked with Fred, but clothing.

Or, put more bluntly: bribery.

She walked into Wolfram and Hart with a light step and a smile on her face, twirling her new parasol of ripped black lace, wearing her new fishnet gloves and stockings and a new black dress with ruffles all along the neckline and hem, which had come from that handy thrift store down the block from their apartment.

(When had Spike started thinking of it as “their” apartment?)

She also wore a new necklace, from an antique shop, some old cast-off of cloisonné flowers and brass leaves that was labeled “Victorian” but was probably post-war, if he knew anything about women’s jewelry – and he did. Still, the joy Dru took in it was worth pawning the Zippo.

Okay, so when Spike felt guilty, he bought things. He still hadn’t explained to Dru that she would be staying in a holding cell. He’d tried to bring it up, of course, but Drusilla’s attention was hard to keep when she was shopping, and he hadn’t been motivated enough to press.

And he was completely out of cash. He’d have to ask Fred to ‘commission’ him again.

Fred met them in the lobby, looking eager with her glasses on and a clipboard at hand. “Great, you’re early. You look lovely, Drusilla. Are you excited?”

Drusilla tipped her chin up and collapsed the parasol. “I am a grown princess and I don’t care what Daddy thinks of me invading his castle.”

“That’s the spirit, Dru! That’s right. You’re a big girl. Killed you a slayer, didn’t you? Uh…” Spike retracted his hand from patting Drusilla’s shoulder. “Not that that’s something to be proud of.”

“We’ll go straight up to the lab,” Fred said, tactfully ignoring Spike’s last comments.

Drusilla walked regally forward, head back, looking at everyone – and everything – as if she knew all their secrets.

Perhaps she did.

Spike followed her with the frantic movements and diligent glances of a border collie herding a sheep through a den of wolves.

He was probably not far off from that, either. Fred tried to hide her amusement as she led them up the stairs.

“EEE!”

They all stopped, frozen at the sudden, ear-splitting screech.

Harmony jumped out from behind her desk, assuming a fighting stance that was very much at odds with her pink spaghetti-strapped sundress. “What is SHE doing here?”

Drusilla made a small, self-satisfied hum.

Spike grimaced. “Harm, keep it down, yeah? We’re hoping not to involve Captain Forehead in this.”

“I take it you know each other?” Fred tried to step between the vampiresses.

“That’s the crazy skank who broke Blondie Bear’s heart! And look at him! Oh my god! You’re back with her, aren’t you? Again!” Harmony put her hands on her hips and threw her head back. “Unbelievable. Why do guys always go for the total witches? It’s like you want to be treated like crap!”

“I respect her mind,” Spike growled.

Drusilla stuck her tongue out very briefly.

“That’s it,” Harmony said, and stomped back to her desk. Spike ran to catch her hand before it went to the intercom.

“Guys,” Fred craned her head nervously. “Angel knows we’re doing this, there’s no reason…”

“She’s an evil vampire. I’m calling security.” Harmony tried to wrestle out of Spike’s grip.

Spike turned pleading eyes to Fred. “Just take Dru on up and get started. Gotta do some damage control here with the ex.”

“Oh, now I’m ‘the ex’. You wouldn’t even acknowledge…”

Fred hurried Drusilla before her into the elevators. “Come on.”

Drusilla smiled and leaned back against the back of the elevator. “Silly little buzzing bee,” she said. “It’s fun outmatching an opponent so. My Spike has no need of her. Had no need from the start, if he’d known better.”

“I always kinda wondered about them,” Fred confessed. “I dunno – they seem compatible in a way, fun-loving, the ditzy blondes...”

Drusilla’s forehead crinkled with bones as her fangs dropped. She hissed at Fred, who cowered against the doors and was grateful when they parted onto the science floor. “Not that I think they should have been together! I mean, Harmony is, uh… look! Here we are!”

Knox waved from behind his lab station.

Fred guided Drusilla past him toward where she’d set up the tests for her, but as they passed, Drusilla covered her mouth, chortling knowingly and waving her finger at Knox, who nearly dropped the cold-ray gun he was working on. (For fire demons.)

“You remember I told you about Drusilla?” Fred widened her eyes meaningfully.

“Yes,” Knox said, and coughed, and made an easy smile. “Are you going to start right in with the anti-psychotics?”

“We’re going to set a baseline on blood chemistry, first.” Fred took both of Drusilla’’s hands and smiled eagerly at her. “There’s been work done in a very external way on vampire mental disorders, but they all ignore internal chemistry! We’ll be breaking brand new ground in paranormal biology!”

“Where others build castles, she builds universities in the air.” Drusilla swayed and let herself be led to a seat, where she perched, carefully folding her parasol beside her. “Will you see the secret places inside me? What makes me what I am?”

“That’s what we’ll find out,” Fred assured, and started taking her readings.

It went well; save for once when Drusilla balked at having electrodes attached to her head, and broke a lot of lab equipment expressing her displeasure. Fortunately, Spike had returned from consoling Harmony at that point and simply told Dru the electrodes were part of a marvelous new hat.

Fred stared in disbelief as the vicious vampire said, “Oh,” and sat demurely to receive what she earlier could not abide.

All the data that could be collected was, and Fred started putting the equipment away. Spike leaned over her shoulder, frowning. “So is that it, then, those little squiggles and dots going to tell you how to cure my princess?”

“This was preliminary data, Spike. It’s just showing us the baseline, before we try anything. Dr. Stopheles, the company psychiatrist, is going to meet with her next. He has some ideas already, based on her case history. We’re going to try counseling, medication, some minor wellness spells, everything at our disposal.” She picked up her printouts and wapped Spike with them. “So quit hovering.”

Drusilla was touching her head where the electrodes had been, ghosting her fingers over their connections. “Never had pictures taken of my brain before.”

“It’s a beautiful brain,” Spike said. “Loveliest ever made. Should have had this done years ago.”

Drusilla wrapped her arms around Spike. “Oh, I want to see it! May I see it, Spike?”

“When we finish analyzing the data,” Fred said. “It doesn’t look like much now, but I’ll make a nice computer model for you. We’re done here, now. Really.” Fred made shooing gestures when the hint fell on deaf ears. “You can take her up to the holding area now.”

Drusilla had been playfully running her hands around Spike’s shirt collar and leaning against him. She pulled back and narrowed her eyes. “What is this?”

“They’ve set up a room for you, love. For you to stay in while Fred does her tests.”

“For both of us, you mean.” Dru stared archly.

Spike stammered and looked foolish and caught-out, which was exactly what he was. “Yeah. Of course. Both of us.”

“I know when you lie!”

“Bet that takes psychic power,” Knox muttered to Fred, who elbowed him.

Drusilla started to whine, her fists tight at her sides.

“We better go,” Spike said, taking her arm, though she tore it from his grasp twice. “Come on, kitten. You’re right; I’m a bad man. I’ll stay with you. Time for dinner now, isn’t it?”

“Why would you lie to princess? No, it isn’t just a visit, is it? I’m to be captured, locked in the tower!”

“No, love, no.” He wrapped his arms around her waist and drew her close to him. He kissed her ear. “It’s only temporary. You’ll see. Like a hotel.”

She leaned back against him. “The hotel in Belgium had the sweetest porters.”

“But we aren’t going to eat the porters tonight, are we love?”

She sighed heavily. “The princess went forever to bed without dessert, so her prince would love her.”

Spike kissed her ear and waltzed her to the door.

Fred shook her head, watching until they were gone. Then she sat down, exhausted. “I never would have guessed Spike could be so patient!”

“You were patient,” Knox said, stepping behind her to rub the tension from her shoulders. “You were magnificent as always.”

“Oh, you!” Fred blushed, uncomfortable as always under his adoring gaze.

***

The holding cell was, as promised, decorated and made cozy. Someone in maintenance had an inkling what Drusilla would like, for it was draped in silks and velvets and gossamer, all glittering in jewel tones.

But Dru did not miss the security guards, nor the way every door closed behind them swiftly. As soon as they entered the room, Spike tried to get her interested in the pillows, but she turned and tried the door, finding it locked. She growled and beat her hands against it.

“Love, I’m sorry. It was the only way. Angel wanted to _kill_ you, love.”

Drusilla struck him in the face, raking her sharp nails through his skin. “Lies. Lies lies lies!”

He tried to catch her wrists but she was quick and wild, twisting out of his grasp and attacking again. “He lies! He traps princess in the tower! He doesn’t trust. Doesn’t tell. Lies!”

Spike was getting cut to ribbons, especially his forearms which he raised to defend his face. Blood was scenting the room now and Drusilla howled, hair flying mad as she threw herself on the bed.

“I want my daddy,” she said, wrapping her arms and legs around a large pillow.

Spike sank against the wall next to her. He rubbed a trickle of blood from his brow before it could get into his eyes. “You’ve got me, pet. Long as you need me.”

It was many hours later, in the mid-afternoon, that Spike woke from a fitful slumber to find Drusilla delicately licking his wounds. He turned to her and kissed her. He kissed her forehead where the electrodes had left small clammy patches and kissed the side of her face down to her chin. “Drink some, love,” he whispered, craning his neck toward her mouth, and she sank her teeth in.

Spike bit too, gently, but didn’t drink, he just wanted to feel his fangs inside flesh. And when Drusilla lost interest in drinking and was just playing with the bite, nibbling at it and licking, he detached himself from her and sank down her body, kissing her neckline and breasts, sliding the fabric of her gown over her belly. He laid down between her elegant legs and pressed his apologies to her with lips and tongue, quietly, reverently, the only sounds the rustling of fabric and quiet gasps of pleasure.


	10. Chapter Nine: Going to the Doctor

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> In this chapter Dru meets the incomparable Dr. M. Stopheles. (Friend of Dr. M. Phisto.)
> 
> Okay, he's actually boring - it's not his story! But things are not going so smooth for our dear old couple. (Surprised?)

Drusilla had been tricked into chains a time or two, by Daddy or Grandmummy or even Spike. They would lock her up because she had fits and they wanted Peace and quiet.

Drusilla knew this and resented it. And she knew that was what was happening here, when she woke up in the pretty jail cell.

Her Spike was with her, though, looking well-ravaged, prone and supple. He hugged the large soft pillow to his face like he had held her hips the night before. She stroked his smooth skin and he made a soft noise into the down. She couldn’t be cross with him. She knew that she loved him, even if sometimes she forgot everything else, she knew this, and Spike was there, with her, no golden girl floating around his head with her impossible goodness, grail-like unobtainable.

But this didn’t make sense. Wasn’t the quest to prove her faithfulness? How could she be virtuous with no temptations to overcome?

The only explanation, of course, was either the evil fairies were confusing dear Spike yet again, or it was Daddy’s fault.

Since this was Daddy’s castle, she strongly suspected the latter. She looked up at the ceiling, where she could feel secret eyes gazing on her and made her prettiest cross expression, just so the evil eyes would know with whom they were dealing.

A voice called through the air. “Spike? Spike, man, wake up!”

It wasn’t a fairy or a star, that was for certain, this voice was in the air but not carrying portents, so Drusilla ignored it.

“Come on, Spike. I don’t have all morning. I gotta be in court!”

Her prince woke, lifting himself on his arms, his chest revealed to her in shadow – yummy!

He squinted up at a little grate by the door. Oh, that’s where the voice came from. “Charlie? Wot?”

“Yeah, it’s me. What are you doing in there? Look, put some clothes on and step over here so I can let you out of the cell. We have to meet before your girlfriend’s little psych appointment.”

Drusilla didn’t like the way the voice said ‘girlfriend’. She growled at it.

“Bugger,” Spike said, and held his head in that way he had when he didn’t understand things.

He started hopping into his jeans, covering all that lovely skin with harsh denim. Drusilla caught the waistband with her fingertips to stop him.

He twisted out of her reach. “Sorry, love. Time to go to work, I guess.”

“And leave princess in her tower.”

“No, not for long, love. Just temporary.”

His eyes were lying.

He slipped out the door, which only opened the barest moment for him.

Drusilla sat on the bed. “But I haven’t any music,” she said. The voice didn’t answer.

***

“What can you possibly be thinking? You’re as insane as she is, as is Angel for agreeing to this!”

Spike finished drinking down the mug of blood he held before saying, “And good morning to you too, Wes.”

Wesley paced the break room. “I made allowances for Darla, and that was a mistake. This cannot go on.” He stopped, planting his fists on the table in front of Spike. “Your sire is mad, incurably so. She should be put down, not treated!”

“Milk of human kindness, you are.”

“The firm will not accept these expenses. We had a hard enough time justifying the operation to re-attach your hands. She is not on payroll and neither are you. Do you understand?”

“I understand that _her_ sire agreed to try, and he out-ranks you, so you can piss off.”

Wesley sat down in the opposite chair, his hands clasped almost as if in prayer before him. “It’s you I’m concerned for, Spike. Darla very nearly convinced Angel to give up everything, his redemption, his very soul. And she was far, far from that ruined creature you brought in to us.”

Spike shoved the table back hard as he stood. “What did you just call my girl?”

“Be reasonable,” Wes said.

“What, like you? Here’s a hint, mate: reasonable and love don’t share a tube stop. Your reasonableness is what’s keeping you sad and lonely.”

“My private life is none of your business.”

“I wish I could ignore it! You all but conceding Fred to that Knox wanker. I don’t like him – he smells too clean.”

Wes raised his eyes to the ceiling. “Thank you, Spike, once again, for ignoring my reasonable warning about a mad, evil creature, and presuming to warn me about office romance. Yes, I see, the situations are completely equal.”

Spike sauntered to the break-room fridge. “Bugger off. I have another quart of otter to polish off – drinking for two, you know.”

“I’m aware I can’t stop you – not while Angel is convinced this is worth doing. But I am not going to help, and I’ll be damned if I let this project consume more of his time.”

“Good. Don’t want the poof involved anyway.” Spike emerged with a new thermos and tilted it in salute. “He makes her crazy.”

***

“Tell me why you call him ‘daddy’.”

Drusilla squished up her features. She didn’t like this doctor at all. She was told she was going to see a doctor and had actually gotten a little excited. Doctors had stirrups and ropes and mmmm scalpels! This doctor only had a quiet little room with pictures of roses on the walls and a box of disposable tissues on his desk. No tongue depressors or examinations at all!

He tapped his pen against his hand and then asked, “Tell me about your real father. Do you remember him? How do your feelings toward your biological father relate to your vampiric sire?”

Drusilla didn’t like those questions at all. She squeezed her eyes shut to make them go away and hummed. Sometimes pixies and fairies were silent, not in evidence at all, but humming could bring them back.

“Drusilla? Drusilla, stay with me. Let’s try a less alarming subject, shall we? Tell me if you know why you’re here.”

She slit one eye open. The fairies had not come, the office was still boring and the doctor was looking at her expectantly. “You sang a Phil Collins song to the green demon,” she said. “He found you without destiny, a void. It hurt his mind more than your flat notes.”

“Do you often see past episodes when you converse with someone?”

“I want to go home.”

“Yes, I’m sure you do. I won’t keep you long. But you must answer some of my questions. Can you see anything else, about me? How much control do you have over your sight?”

Drusilla raised her eyebrow. “Do you control what _you_ see?”

“No. But I’m not special, like you.”

“I’m a princess.”

The doctor wrote something down and nodded. “What does it mean, to be a princess?”

Dru scowled. “You must know that. What silly questions you ask! Like you don’t know anything at all. But your eyes are naughty, they say you know many, many things. You think you know more than princess. But if I wanted I could take it all from you, your past and future and your bland little mind.” She straightened in her chair, enjoying the flicker of discomfort that came to him. “Would you like to learn? Look into my eyes. Deep. In me.”

The doctor looked only at his notepad, writing again. “I’m familiar with your power of mesmerism. And yes, I know what a princess is, but I want to know what being a princess means _to you_. We are talking here, Drusilla, so that I can learn about you, and how you see the world.”

“I see it with my eyes, silly man.”

“Princess. Please. Let’s just start there. When did you become a princess?”

Drusilla wrapped her arms around one knee and rested her cheek on top of it, enjoying the feel and smell of the velvet skirt as it spread over her skin. “I became a princess when I gained a knight errant. My beautiful William, all heart and yearning. I saw it, you see. I saw his quests and triumphs and the beautiful way he breaks and comes back together again. He fell into my hands like a baby bird from the nest. Daddy said I could have a companion of my own, you know, and he just fell, right there where the fairies promised, an angel he was, so innocent, delicious. Mmmm… a taste I will always want anew.”

“Have your visions always been useful?”

She blinked in wide-open amazement. “You really always ask exactly the wrong questions. Poor man, it must be a terrible handicap. Let mummy into your mind; I’ll blank it out and make it all better.”

“I’ll take that as a ‘no’, and answer with my own, _no_.” The doctor shifted nervously in his chair, not wanting to look up at her anymore but unsure where to rest his eyes otherwise. “Are you happy, Drusilla, with how your life is?”

“I want to go home. There’s no music here and it smells of frustration and scrubbing powder.” She wrinkled her nose. “I could just kill you. Snap your thick neck,” she made a disturbing demonstrative finger-snap. “Oh, but it is bothersome! Spike wouldn’t want me to.”

“Yes. Let’s talk about that some more. Your motivation for getting better is for him, isn’t it? Many patients find they can achieve great things, if they only have someone encouraging them.”

Drusilla sank back in her chair, looking tired and wan as a fainting victim. “It is getting to be an awful lot,” she said, “What Spike wants and wouldn’t want. But I must bear it. Princess must endure, for the Prince’s sake. He bore so much for love, though not for me. My tests were hardly effort compared to hers.” She grimaced spitefully.

“This is good. Tests, quests, knights. It’s all very Milton, isn’t it? But as a seer, can you see the outcome? Do you know already if your treatment will be successful? Or can you understand enough to know what sanity entails?”

She sat up sharply. “Another wrong question! You really are quite mad!”

***

Spike returned as soon as he could to the holding cell, to find it empty. The guards wouldn’t open it for him. “This isn’t a hotel,” they said.

He stomped and stormed his way through the building then, looking for someone to intimidate. As luck would have it, Harmony was at her desk. “Harm. Be a love and get those Neanderthals to let me in to my fuckin’ guest room.”

“You don’t have a guest room,” she said, with the thick annoyance of one being interrupted from legitimate work. A fat “Cosmopolitan” magazine sat under her freshly-painted nails.

With slightly less bravado, Spike shrugged. “Where me an’ Dru are stayin’.”

“You mean the jail cell? Yeah. The things you get away with around here pretty much make me think there’s nothing you could do to get put in there.”

“C’mon, Harm! You’re not still sore!”

“Ha! As if you could _make_ me sore.” She flipped the pages of her magazine with vicious flicks. “When I think of how broken up you were, the _mess_ you were when I found you…”

“Yeah. Yeah. You made me a new man. And I thought we agreed that I wasn’t worth getting upset about.”

“Oh you so aren’t.”

“So don’t be upset. Just help me get into the room an’ I’ll be out of your hair.”

“Oh you so aren’t even IN my hair. You aren’t even near it.”

Spike sighed heavily. He put his elbows on the counter, his hands together. “Please. Gorgeous Harmony, goddess of administration, for everything that we shared, please just point me toward the blokes who make the fuckin’ keys.”

“Mm-hm,” she said, and finally gave up pretending to read her magazine. “They won’t let you back in there. Executive decision was to keep you out of the holding cell. Executive means Angel, and I don’t cross bossy. I like existing.”

Spike felt, well, frankly betrayed. “Why would he do that?”

“You’ll have to ask him. Anyway, Droodzilla isn’t even up there. She’s in testing still and you’re not going to get to see THAT, either. That’s science division’s decision. That’s Fred.”

His shoulders slumped as he straightened away from the desk. “Thanks, Harm.”

“Are you out of my hair yet? I have calls to make.”

***

Spike stood alone in the apartment he had lived in, alone, up until she came. All around him was evidence of her touch, her flair for life. He gathered up her doll, some more clothes and the prettiest of the scarves. He set them on the sofa and started shuffling through the CDs, picking out her favorites.

There was no music. He sat down on the television table, not looking at the plastic cases in his hands. The only sounds he could here were Mrs. Haverstrom’s television set, next door, and the endless, monolithic hum of the refrigerator. All that was personal, all that was homey in the apartment, he was packing up for Dru, because it was all hers. He had no music, without her. Never had.


	11. Chapter Ten: Shells

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Okay kids! This chapter finally answers a question many have been asking in comments. Special Delivery for Winifred Burkle: One stone sarcophagus!

Fred screeched when she stepped into the lab and saw a giant stone sarcophagus filling up most of the walkway between the lab benches.

A hand flat against her chest, she swallowed. “What is that?”

Knox looked up cheerfully from his workbench. “I couldn't find any invoice on it. I thought maybe you went crazy on eBay.”

“Was it addressed to me?”

“Yeah. No return address, if you’re curious. I’ve already started scanning. Everything is bouncing off of it, which doesn’t thrill me.”

Fred felt that ‘black cat walked down my spine’ level of spooked: warnings about coffins and presents haunting her. “Throw this in quarantine. Full containment. No one goes near it without hazmat level A suits.”

Knox stood, blinking. “You want to treat this as a vapor threat? I set my coffee on that!”

“I just. I dunno. I have a bad feeling about this. A real, real, bad feeling. So let’s just play it paranoid, okay? And try to find out where it came from!” She backed toward the door, looking at the coffin like it might leap at her.

Knox followed her. “Wait a minute. I mean, come on, you’re not even going to look at it?” He rocked on his heels. “Cool old sarcophagus. Lunch at ‘Mi Pueblo’ says it’s a mummy.”

The lure of tacos clearly was swaying her judgment. “I don’t know.” She grimaced, tilting her head at the ominous stone coffin. “Drusilla _told me_ I’d be getting a coffin in the mail. Is that weird? She said if I opened it, well, that part was kind of vague and weird, but I got the ‘bad bad things’ gist.”

“Oh come on, we eat prophecies and visions for breakfast and re-write them before lunch. What harm could just a teeny peek do?” He clapped his hands. “Tell you what, we won’t open it. I mean, hey! I’m with you on that. We’ll just examine and record the external carvings.”

“Yes,” Fred said, “in nice, air-tight hazmat suits.” She turned to go once again and was shocked when Knox’s hand closed on her wrist, hard and insistent.

“I can’t let you lock it away,” he said.

***

Spike jogged, following Angel through the corridors of Wolfram and Hart with a cardboard box in his hands full of frilly belongings, a blonde curly-haired doll right on top.

“It’s been days, Angelus, and you know how she is when you leave her alone!”

“It’s not my call. I’m not the science department, and I’m not the psychiatry department.” He turned and continued walking backward. “And I’m certainly not the patience department. Keep pestering me and I’m going to be the kick scrawny vampire ass department.”

Spike set down his box. “Who are you calling ‘scrawny’, wide load?”

Gunn stepped out of an office to see the two vampires squaring off. “Hey,” he raised his hands. “Calm down, guys.”

“Forehead here is keeping me away from my girl,” Spike said. He advanced on Angel, chin out. “Which I suppose I should have seen coming. Is this really about helping her, or are you helping yourself to a little playtime, ‘daddy’?”

Angel glared, eyes hard black coals, unable to speak at the accusation.

“Easy. It’s not her we’re worried about, man, it’s you.”

Spike whirled on Gunn. “You, too? You’re in on this?”

“Spike, she’s crazy, she’s part of your past, and I don’t have to remind you what your past was like, do I? We just don’t think it’s a good idea, you spending lots of time with her.” Gunn tried to look placating.

“I’m not permitted to see her, either,” Angel said.

“You’re all barmier than she is! What kind of ‘therapy’ is it to keep her from any friendly faces? You want to drive her to kill again, is that it?”

“What? Spike, I was dealing with Dru while you were still breathing…”

Gunn held up a hand to stop Angel. When he had both vampire’s attention, he nodded, once, and turned to Spike with eyebrows raised, lawyer-mode full on, “Have you considered the moral and _legal_ implications of a sexual relationship with someone not completely in their right mind?”

“What the bleedin’ hell are you saying, Charlie-boy?”

“There is a concern about consent.”

“Consent!”

Angel grabbed Spike’s arm before he swung. “Listen to the man…”

“I’ll show you ‘consent’…”

“I’m just stating…”

All three men were silenced by a sudden cry coming from the lab.

***

Fred screamed.

“It’s because I love you. You’re perfect.” Knox had Fred’s arm locked with his, struggling and slipping on the floor as he dragged her toward the sarcophagus.

“This is going on your review.” Fred elbowed him hard; gaining a temporary respite she hollered, “Help! Is there no help in this building?”

A flurry of footsteps rained down the corridor. The door burst open and three men only took a moment to stare in confusion before Angel had Knox by the throat, against the wall. “What are you doing?”

Spike led Fred to a stool, carefully examining the bruises on her arm. Fred waved him away. “He went nuts. He wanted me to touch the sarcophagus. Wait – don’t!” She held her uninjured arm out to stop Gunn.

Gunn held both hands up. “Okay. No one touches.”

“It’s nothing,” Knox gasped, trying not to sound hysterical and failing. “It’s an artifact. Just look at it. What… what harm could it do?”

“I do know something that causes harm – hurting Fred,” Angel said, shaking him.

“Woah. Hey, hey, easy, big guy!”

Fred looked earnestly into Spike’s eyes. “Drusilla told me I’d receive a coffin, and if I opened it, something bad would happen, I’d be hollowed out, or something.”

“You did right, pet. Never fool with one of Dru’s visions. They have a nasty habit of coming true.”

“It would make you a god,” Knox pleaded. “It’s wonderful… destined.”

Angel threw him to the floor. “Spike, take Mr. Destined to a holding cell. Let’s get this coffin quarantined. No one so much as breathes on it.”

***

A man in a blue-grey shirt with a shiny black belt and baton delivered a cardboard box full of music, scarves, a hairbrush and a doll. These were Drusilla's things, he said, from home.

Her head hurt. The blood they fed her in cups was thick, tepid, and tasted of medicine.

And then the doctor had insisted in asking her again and again about her sisters until she couldn’t duck under or around the question but had to answer it and she cried.

No sisters. No family. No Spike. A box of things was hardly solace. She lay on the narrow bed and stared at the camera in the ceiling, wondering who watched and why they hated her so.

***

Here’s a little fact they don’t teach you on TV: torture doesn’t yield answers. In fact, all you can do torturing someone is get them to tell you what they think you want to hear. There’s no more surety that it’s the truth than if you just asked them. Less, even.

So Spike took the request that he ‘get information’ out of Knox for what it really was: a useless exercise to keep him busy.

He tried not to think that they’d chosen him for this job because they mistook black leather for ruthlessness and considered His Poufiness to have a shinier soul. Oh sure, have Spike do the torture. Even when he’d had no soul he’d felt like a pretender holding hot pokers, like he was playing a role written for someone else.

Still, he entered the room with one of Angel’s more wicked-looking daggers in hand, cleaning his fingernails with it. “Let’s get a few things straight, Knoxie: I never liked you even when I thought your biggest crime was being a nerd. Fred, on the other hand, was the only person on this green earth who tried to get me back from my non-corporeal hell. So when I say I have no patience…”

“I’ll tell you everything.” Knox bore the eager smile of a missionary on a fresh doorstep, despite his hands being bound tightly behind the hard metal chair. “I chose Fred because I love her. She’s strong and smart and beautiful. No one less could be special enough to be the vessel for my god.”

Spike sighed and twirled his knife. The little shit wasn’t even letting him intimidate him properly. He jabbed the point into the arm-rest of Knox’s chair, close to where his arm wrapped around the back to be tied. “And this God?”

“Illyria. One of the old ones from the Deeper Well. Ruler of the Primordium.”

“Would have done what to Fred?”

“Illyria would take her body as a vessel to live in. Fred would be replaced – extinguished, sacrificed.”

Spike set his hands on the arm-rests and sighed. “And I’m keeping you alive, because?”

Knox opened and closed his mouth. He frowned and looked to the side. “Huh. Guess maybe I shouldn’t talk? Because then you’d want to keep me for questioning.”

“Well it would make this interrogation session a lot more fun for me,” Spike said, glaring at him.

The little prick smiled shakily. “It doesn’t matter. Illyria’s coming was foretold. This is all destined to take place. You think I was hurting Fred, but there’s nothing farther from the truth. She would be immortalized, her image the face of a god!”

Spike straightened. “Well, Poindexter, if it’s such a marvelous fate why didn’t you take it yourself?”

Knox’s shoulders rose as far as the bonds allowed and he gave the embarrassed smile of the knowingly hypocritical.

“Yeah, all right. I’ve had about enough of this. One last question before I lamp you and call it a night – who helped you? Don’t tell me you did it all on your own, genius boy that you are.”

Knox started laughing.

Spike kicked the git across the room – the chair made a nice loud sound as it hit the wall and the boy screamed, probably had at least sprained a shoulder on impact. Disgusted, Spike walked out of the room.

***

Spike didn’t get all the details from what the others had found out, but Angel slipped into brogue a bit, which wasn’t a good sign. They just met in the hallway, all on their way from one task or another.

Wesley ran into the hall with a bunch of papers in his fist. “It was held up in customs. Someone at this firm signed the release order. I don’t know who yet.”

Gunn fell against the wall like he’d been shot. “Oh god.”

“Got something you want to share with the rest of the class, Charlie-boy?”

Angel held up one hand – the other was on his forehead rubbing tension from his creased brow. “Witch-hunting accomplices takes a back seat to getting this dangerous thing out of here. Harmony? Is the plane ready yet?”

“They’re loading the scary thing now.” Harmony stood behind her desk. “So twenty minutes?”

“Were are you going?” Wes asked.

“Back where this thing came from: the Deeper Well. Spike, want to take a trip back to the homeland?”

Spike considered it. “Hours in a plane with you just to deliver a giant stone box? Rather not, Peaches. Got my princess to look after.”

“Oh god!” Harmony jumped up again. “That was security. Some idiot left Knox with a knife. He’s escaped.”

Gunn, Wes, and Angel all glared at Spike, who rolled his eyes skyward and cursed. Wordlessly they split, running in opposite directions.

***

It was a quiet gathering at the Cat and Fiddle. They were all there – all of Team Angel but the boss man himself. It took a full round before talking started. They were stunned. It was a familiar feeling to Spike, that feeling you get when a bullet hits the tree next to your head or the stake lands in your gut rather than your heart.

They’d dodged fate, and were waiting for the bill to come.

Knox was found in the cargo bay of the private jet, in the process of ripping the air-tight plastic away from Illyria’s coffin. He was confined right there and was even now winging his way to England with Angel, to face some sort of mystical whatever in the “Deeper Well” whatever that was.

Gunn kept shaking his head, repeating, “What almost happened. What I almost let happen.”

“Knox,” Fred would say. “I trusted him! He was so nice.”

Spike didn’t have attention for elder gods or avoided disasters. His eyes were on his untouched beer, his mind on Dru, who he hadn’t seen in days now, and who could be suffering an initiative-like experience, for all the window-dressing Wolfram and Hart added.

Wesley had been sitting very close to Fred, and hardly taking his eyes off of her. For him, at least, one possible result of the release of this Ill-whatever-a, was clear.

“So, Wes,” Spike said, forcing a smile to his face. “Gonna be a while before you let her out of your sight?”

Wesley almost blushed, the old boy, and picked up his beer to hide it. “Yes. Well, I’m just relieved no one was hurt.”

“Except Knox,” Fred said. And grimaced. “But he can be hurt the little… little… jerk!”

“Harsh words,” Lorne said, raising his glass. “I’m so sorry, Freddles. I should have read it. All I saw when he sang ‘Black is Black’ was awkwardness and a terrible habit of flattening high notes.” Lorne rolled his eyes in silent testimony to hundreds of painfully mangled pop songs.

Fred had snuggled into Wes’s side, his arm was over her shoulders now and he was looking down at her fondly, exuberantly happy.

Spike decided that he’d waited long enough for politeness’ sake. He pushed his beer away. “Like you all to remember it was my girl saved our bacon here. Might even have saved Fred’s life.”

“Yes, remarkable,” Wes said. “A seer of that ability could be invaluable to us.”

Lorne muttered, “She beat my little green socks.”

“I think it’s great,” Fred said. “We gain a future-seeing person, and, well, gosh, if a couple can stay together a century, break up, have one of them gain a soul and save the world an’ all and still end up back together? Well, that says something.”

“I want to see her,” Spike said. “I want to know how she’s doing. What she’s doing. You all are going on about this silly sarcophagus like it was the near end of the world. Dru’s world is ending. I can’t let them hurt her.”

“We’re not,” Fred said, a little too emphatically – she was starting to feel the effects of the alcohol.

“How do I know that? Why won’t they bloody let me see her?”

“Oh they will – I mean, we will.” Fred squeezed Wes’s hand. “If I say it’s okay it’s okay, isn’t it?”

Wes smiled weakly. “Who am I to stand in the way of romance?”


	12. Chapter Eleven: Too Much to Dream

Spike had wanted to go straight to the holding cell, to spend the night with Drusilla. He didn’t understand the rest of the gang’s general agreement that his ‘visit’ should be taken care of after they had all gotten a night’s rest.

Rather than go back to the empty apartment he crashed on the sofa in Angel’s office – and found it to be more comfortable than his bed, which shouldn’t have been a surprise, considering. Not a lot of thought could have gone into outfitting his apartment.

He wondered where “Doyle” was, now. All Angel had said was that the Senior Partners had “taken” him. Spike rolled over. There was always someone who had it worse.

***

Fred led him to a conference room, patting the air near him with her hands as though she could tamp down his agitation. “The thing about vampire physiology is, well, the super healing isn’t always a good thing. Your body is constantly repaired back to the state it was in at the time of death. Which includes brain chemistry. Someone dies clinically depressed, they just _stay_ that way. So Drusilla was killed in a state of nervous breakdown, and in a sense she’s been that way ever since – emotionally volatile, functioning when she can in a child-like state just to endure the high endorphins in her own mind. It’s really…” Spike glared at her. She fidgeted. They were at the door now. She put her back to it. “Right. Not fascinating at all. Horrible. Anyway, the good news is we _can_ treat the chemical imbalance. We’re trying a variety of drugs right now and she is responding. The bad news is, well, once she goes off the medication, the brain chemistry will revert right back where it was. It’s not a cure, it’s a treatment.”

“So my Dru is in there?” He nodded at the door.

“Figuring out the right medication is tricky, Spike. We’re in a period of trial and error, during which she is going to be watched very closely. Dr. Stopheles…”

“Is this the trial or the error? What does all this mean? Is Dru okay?”

“She’s fine! I’m told the reactions this morning are very good, and the chemical levels are responding exactly as we hypothesized! So, yeah, she’s doing really well.”

Spike lowered his eyebrows.

Fred bit her lip. “Which you would believe me a lot better if I just got out of the way and let you in, huh?”

Spike nodded slowly while Fred awkwardly stepped aside.

It was another anonymous wood-paneled room like dozens at Wolfram and Hart. At the conference table – real wood of course – Drusilla sat. She was in the blue taffeta dress – the one she had worn when she first walked back into his life. It looked particularly odd in this setting, like she was a child playing dress-up.

She turned large, sorrowful eyes on him and stood, slowly, reaching for him. She had the tattered black lace hand-gloves on. He reached for her, and their fingers entwined. He slid his arm around her slender waist, stepping back as though to start dancing, but Drusilla didn’t follow as he lead. She looked confused.

“Where have you been, my Spike?”

“’M sorry,” he said, and kissed her hands. “Some wanker tried to summon an elder god or something. It wasn’t important. Not like you are. Love, I’m so, so sorry. They wouldn’t let me see you.”

She nodded. Absently, she backed away from his embrace and sank into her chair again. There were tarot cards spread out on the table – a Rider-Waite set, still gleaming from the package. She picked up the three of swords and looked at it like she wasn’t sure what it was.

Spike took the chair next to her and gathered up her other hand. “How do you feel, pet?”

“Sad,” she said, and set the card down. “Sad and still.” She tilted her head, brow crinkling. “I think I’m bored.”

Spike laughed. He kissed the little V between her pretty eyebrows. “Never thought I’d see you bored before me.” He brushed her hair back from her face, peppering kisses on her cool smooth cheeks. “Just bein’ with you right now is all I want.” She turned slightly away from him, staring at the cards on the table. She was so passive, unresponsive. Spike stood and stepped behind her chair. He carded her hair in his fingers, moving it off her shoulders and laying it neatly on her back. “Petal? What do the cards say?”

She shook her head. “They don’t say anything.”

Spike frowned, fingers stilling. He tapped the three of swords, since she had seemed most interested in it. “What does this one, mean, then?”

“The repose of the divided heart,” she said, a flat recitation.

He rubbed little circles into the base of her neck with his thumbs. She’d always liked that. “You know you saved little Fred’s life? Your warning, petal, stopped her from walking right into a trap.”

Dru gathered up the cards and shuffled them. “Did I?”

Spike kissed her dear scalp. “You’re a regular hero now, pet.”

“So the tests will end soon?” She tapped the cards into a neat block and set them down.

Spike bit his lip. “Not much longer, petal. You’re doing so well.”

Drusilla caught his hand as it stroked her hair. She turned to face him. “Griselda had to prove her patience to earn her prince’s love.”

“That’s right. That’s another story you liked.”

“Enide was tested by Erec, to obey even when disobedience would save him.”

Spike started to worry where this was going. “You don’t have to prove your love to me,” he said.

She laid her head on his arm. He carefully stooped to hold her. “All Lancelot had to do was endure pain and humiliation. You had to die in a pillar of fire. Men always have the easier tasks.”

“Petal. Don’t do this for me. I want you to be happy. If this… well, they’re messing with your brain, aren’t they? If it’s too much….”

“Oh my Spike.” She gave him her first real smile. She twisted and set her hand on his cheek. “You always pass the trials. I saw that. I knew you were the most worthy knight in all the lands. Of course it’s my turn. Everyone must have a turn. It’s only fair.”

Spike felt weak with relief. He kissed her and sank to his knees at her side. He stroked the slippery taffeta over her knees and straightened out wrinkles in her skirt.

“Let’s find something fun to do, yeah? Wanna read my cards, love?”

“Can we go dancing? There’s no music here and I find it so hard to think.”

***

The doctor had wanted to speak with Dru for a while, and Fred had another test to do, but she let Spike hold Drusilla’s hand, this time, as she took her readings.

Drusilla moved like a woman drugged – moreso than usual. Or perhaps a different drug. She was subdued, still and quiet, letting Fred position her arms like a doll.

They were able to dance at last in the holding cell. Spike picked out some of Drusilla’s favorite songs, but when these upset her he switched to the radio. She danced well, still, though she said little. He thought, maybe, it helped her fuzzy-headed state to be able to concentrate on movement, on something physical.

When she tired and Spike curled around her on the bed, he couldn’t sleep, watching her still form. It felt too much like a vigil, and she too much like a corpse, but he couldn’t stop himself from staring and smoothing the hem of her nightgown.

Spike retreated to Angel’s office couch again when Drusilla had to be alone with the doctor, again.

He was trying not to be jealous of the doctor. He was bone-weary and slept, grateful for the dark and stillness of Angel’s office.

And so he was there when Angel returned.

“Spike,” he said, stopping in the doorway, looking at Spike like he was the iron he’d left on for the past two days, burning a peaked hole in the ironing board.

Spike felt like a bloke who’d spent a sleepless night on a couch. Funny that. He sat up and stretched the kinks out of his shoulders. “Just waiting to see my girl. Your office is bigger than my apartment, anyway, git, so don’t begrudge me a moment’s rest.”

Angel scratched his elbow. “How is she?”

“Confused, drugged. Suffering.” Spike rubbed his eyes. “And a side of ‘I don’t bleedin’ know’.”

Angel grimaced. He went to his desk and poked through the papers waiting for him.

“Everything okay on the world-saving end?”

“Yeah,” Angel said. He looked up with an uneasy expression. “Knox kinda turned blue.”

Spike felt like he’d missed a punch line. “And?”

Angel shrugged. He went to the cabinet behind the desk and got out a decanter and glass. “And he was super-strong and beat the crap out of me.”

Spike edged forward on his seat and grinned. “I’m liking this story already.”

“Thought you would.” Angel sighed and drained his full glass before turning and tipping it toward Spike in offer.

“Not going to turn that down,” Spike said, and crossed the room. “Why are you being so nice?”

Angel got out another glass and filled both generously. He kept his eyes on the whiskey. “It was painful, the transformation – Knox was sick as a dog for the whole flight. He screamed a lot. Couldn’t sedate him. And have you ever noticed how small the bottles of liquor are on airplanes?”

“Careful, Peaches, your brood’s showing. Fuck Knox. Got what he deserved.”

Angel shook his head. “We had to draw Illyria out of him, put it back into the casket. It… Knox was hollow. He… when it was ripped out of him, what was left…” Angel set down his glass. “That’s what would have happened to Fred,” he said, quietly.

Spike felt himself dangerously close to comforting the old pouf. He knocked back his own whiskey and broke the mood with a cheery, “How was England?”

“Wet,” Angel said.

“Get any sightseeing in, or was it all just doom and rituals? Hearing you got your ass kicked makes me almost wish I’d gone.”

“Spent some time with an old friend. Drogyn. Mature, respectable, serious – you would have hated him.”

“Played chess and talked about dusty old books, did you?”

Angel really, really wanted to deny that. “We had to wait for the coffin to get, uh, situated. There was a ritual.”

“Pouf.”

Angel grimaced: that truly pained expression that meant he was about to try to say something nice. Spike cut him off. “They’re letting me see her.”

“When? Today?”

Spike nodded.

“Spike, I…”

“Consider it said, Peaches. Let’s just consider it all said, yeah?”


	13. Chapter Twelve: Journey to the Center of the Mind

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Now this chapter of Crazy Madcap is a little dark, and you might get a little angry with the author, but I promise, it all turns out some flavor of all right in the end.

_“You’ll lose your mind and play three games in May. See Emily play.”_

Spike stood at the door to the room, chest rising and falling in anxious, short breaths. Drusilla laid on her side on the bed, curled around the CD player, watching the CD spin in the little window while her fingers trailed lazily over the plastic.

“Hullo, pet,” Spike said, very quietly. He stepped into the room, afraid to break the mood, or maybe more accurately to break her. “Sorry I was so long away. Angel’s crew can be a bunch of wankers sometimes. They thought I’d be disrupting. The therapy.”

He took another hesitant step forward. “Pet?”

“The song doesn’t make sense,” she said. She looked up at him. “I think maybe she is a May Queen and he yearns for her and at the same time fears her. But then I think the song isn’t about Emily at all. She sounds trapped.”

“Syd Barrett was just high off his arse,” Spike said, smiling. He sat on the edge of the bed carefully, not upsetting the player or the other jewel cases scattered about. “Did it used to make sense?”

“It did.” Drusilla sounded a little surprised to hear herself say it. “It did. It made a kind of terrible sense. Portentous.”

He reached, very slowly, and set his hand on her ankle. His tensely bunched shoulders relaxed when she didn’t react to this. “You are a seer, pet. Most everything is portentous.”

“Haven’t been seeing today,” she said, and turned off the player.

“You sound melancholy.”

She pushed the CD player and all the CDs off the bed, they landed in a clatter and breaking of plastic. “This is what it feels like to be sane,” she said.

“Easy, love, don’t take it out on your toys.”

“Toys,” she said disdainfully, throwing one last jewel-case after the others. She knelt on the bed, looking down at the destruction. “I don’t want toys. I don’t want to be a prisoner. I don’t want a doctor to ask me about my sisters and God and Angelus.” She gazed around the room, eyes saucer-wide. “And everything just stays the same, moment after moment. The walls are always there and always beige and they have no secrets, nothing interesting or magical in them. I am so TIRED of these walls!”

He crawled up to her, reaching for her. “Oh, pet.” He wrapped his arms around her.

She stiffened and pulled away. “Where have you been?”

“Talking with Angelus.” He kissed her hair. “Forgive me, love. He’s still a dick, but he tries so hard. It’s unbelievable how adorable he can be when he tries. Gets away with murder, he does, literally, because of that damn clueless face.”

Drusilla wasn’t listening, but she let him gather her up again, resting her arms on the backs of his. Spike kissed the side of her face and rocked her a little. “It will get better, love. Very soon. They have to learn to trust you, to see you like I do. Fred already thinks the world of you. The others will come around. The watcher can be thick as mud paint, but he’s coming around, even. Trust me, pet. It’ll be better. You wanted it, didn’t you?” There was a touch of anxiety to his voice. He laid his cheek against her head and rocked her gently like a child. “Remember how you used to cry that the stars and fairies were always moving everything? You wanted it all to stay put. I remember you saying that, love. So this is better, right?”

Softly, she spoke, “I wanted so badly for the visions to stop. I prayed to God and promised to give up everything – shave my head, be a nun, take a vow of silence, anything, if He would only stop the visions. And now they’ve stopped.”

“It’s good, isn’t it, pet? It’s a good thing?”

She laid her head on his shoulder, shaking a little as he held her. “I’d see two futures, some times, what would happen if I did things differently. I saw him killing and destroying my family. Raping my sisters and my mother. Driving me slowly mad. I saw another future, where I just gave myself to him. Walked up to him, told him I knew what he was going to do and I wasn’t going to cower in fear and wait. I gave myself to him, and I wasn’t driven mad, and then _I_ killed my family, for his dark approval and my own delight. And you see,” she tilted her head, squinting a little, “I was so afraid of _that_ future, I was willing to let it all happen and lose my mind.”

“Oh, Dru. God, Dru…” he hugged and pet her like he could banish the past with his caresses. “I’m so sorry. Love, if I could have been there…”

She turned and slashed at him, fingernails hooked through his flesh. She pushed him hard away from her. He fell off the bed, plastic bits breaking under his back as he struggled to regain a sitting position.

“I should have done it. I should have let myself kill them. I would love to do it now. I would make them scream and beg so Daddy would be proud.”

There was nothing playful about her cold smile.

Spike felt his heart break. Her mad innocence had evaporated like mist. “Pet,” he pleaded, "don't..."

“Am I your pet? Your princess to lock in a tower while you fight dragons?”

“You’re much more than that!”

“You don’t love me, Spike. Not as I loved you. You love taking care of me, you love being needed and to protect someone. But I’m not as fragile as you think. I’m not your china doll to dress and cosset.”

Spike thought he was the one going insane. “No, love, no. I love you. Your music and your fairies and… the way you see things different than other people.”

“Then you love my madness.”

“I love how you enjoy life. How you gasp at beauty. How you dance, how you…” He grasped for her hands and this time she let him, her eyes boring into his, frowning archly. “Always wanted to know you… you, love. You were always there, in moments and flashes. You, the real you, the person before Angelus ever touched...”

She laughed. “You’re mad,” she said.

“Do you still love me?” He asked.

Her expression was unreadable. She took his arm and drew him back up onto the bed. When they were settled, kneeling, facing each other in the center of the small mattress, she said, “Prove that you love me,” she said. “Be in me.”

Spike looked into her deep eyes and nodded without hesitation. “Anything, for you, love. Anything.”

When he felt his mind slip away like a stone falling into water, his last thought was one of hope and relief.

In their dark days, soulless both, they had played with mesmerism, used it as another trust game like handcuffs or draining. It didn’t matter that Spike wouldn’t be there to enjoy the fruits of his trust – it was the point, rather. Perfectly submitted, perfectly consenting, he would wake later with only clues to what she had done in the meantime. He would be drenched with sex or chained and alone. Sometimes she just lost interest once he was under. Once, to his great dismay, she’d dressed him up in her clothes and let Angelus have him. But it wasn’t trust if there was no danger.

He woke in pain, dry hot pain in all his joints. He struggled to rise and she dropped onto his chest, hair a mess, eyes blazing. “Again,” she said. “Not yet. No, not yet, be in me, Spike. Just in me. Only in me.”

Someone was shouting and banging in the background. Something was wrong. But he promised. He would trust her. He nodded and let the pain and world fade away.

***

Spike instantly knew he was in another room. It smelled of disinfectant and rubber. He tried to sit up and a million little fires lit up inside his body, sending him weakly back into the hospital sheets with a groan and gasp.

Hospital room. Dark. They’d tied him to the bed frame, too. He flexed his fists and grit his teeth against the strain until he was able to break the restraints. Then he passed out a little, but it was a shallow, muzzy passed out, only brown to the deep black he’d been in before.

“Jesus Christ, Spike,” Angel said, and slapped him lightly.

His eyes fluttered open, instantly frowning to see that big forehead leaning over him. “What have you done to her?”

“Her? What did she do to you!”

And Spike saw, to his surprise, fear and worry on Angel’s face. “Are you trying to get yourself dusted? Because I gotta say, Spike, you sure get close but you keep coming up just shy of the mark.”

“Glad you’re still kicking too, Peaches.”

The flimsy hospital bed squealed in protest as Angel grabbed both side-rails. “You let her hypnotize you. You let her tear you into pieces! She was trying to blackmail us into letting her out. Using you. Do you realize – can even you with your immense blind spot realize how incredibly stupid that was?”

On the word ‘stupid’ Angel shook the bed. Every jointure in Spike’s body throbbed. He looked down his length, seeing no evidence but thick white bandages. His elbows and knees and hips should be twice their size, by how they felt. “Tear to pieces” must have been somewhat literal. Spike licked his cracked lips with a dry tongue. “What,” he repeated, “Did you do to her?”

“What you asked, Spike.” Angel pushed away from the bed with disgust. He paced, hands on his head. “We did what you asked. Treated her psychosis.” There was an unspoken “I hope you’re happy” in his stony face.

“Damn it, Angel. Where is she now? What did you do with her now?”

Angel’s expression softened, his eyes tight with pain. He turned away, leaning against the wall he looked out into the hallway. “She’s fine.”

The laugh felt like it tore dry little patches of lung out. “Was it Fred or your guilty conscience kept you from dusting her?”

Angel straightened, fists clenched.

Spike licked his lip again. “Guilty conscience it is.”

A fraction of the anger deflated from Angel’s shoulders, but he spoke in hard, clipped sentences, his head jerking a little at the end of each. “We haven’t decided what to do with her. Yet. But this project is over. Your guilty conscience isn’t worth dying. Not every soul can be saved.” The rest of his anger melted. “And certainly not every demon.”

Angel stood there, making no attempt to leave or carry on the conversation. Spike sighed and felt his ribs sore to expand. “An’ now? How’d you get me out?”

“All the holding cells can be filled with gas. We had to wait for her to breathe it, though. It took a long time.” Their eyes met, and he could see Angel hold back the recrimination. SHE never had trouble controlling her breathing. All of Angel’s vampiric family picked it up like a parlor trick, save Spike.

“How long was I out?”

“Three days. God. So stupid!” Angel stormed out the door. Spike could see him, though, standing in the hall just three paces away, one hand on his head.

He smiled a little; despite it all, it was good to have some evidence that the old poof cared.


	14. Chapter 13: Doctor my eyes

Dried blood clung to the creases around her fingernails, a dull contrast to the bright handcuffs that still managed to look like jewelry on her delicate wrists. Her dress – cream muslin today – was also splattered with lacy sprays of red-brown. She was looking at him with complete composure, and for that reason alone she looked more insane than Angel had ever seen Drusilla.

He crossed the room. There was an awkward moment as he tried to draw the chair on his side of the table out only to find that the two chairs and table were all secured to the floor. Probably a good policy in a Wolfram and Hart interrogation room.

“I don’t wish to speak to you,” Drusilla said. “Go away.” She turned her face away as Angel sat down. The chains rustled against her dress. They’d bound her feet too.

Angel looked down at his own hands clasped on the brushed metal table. “I don’t know what to say to you. Don’t know what I _can_ say. I… I’m sorry.”

She turned back to face him, eyebrows raised and lips pursed.

Angel grimaced. “Inadequate words of the year award?”

“Your guilt doesn’t interest me unless it means you’ll take these chains off.” She tilted her head and added, with an evil glint in her eyes, “Daddy.”

Angel felt his stomach knot up and then crawl lower in his abdomen for safety. Now _he_ looked away, unable to face that clear expression, those oh-so-knowing eyes. “Why did you do it, baby? Why did you tear him up like that? You know he loves you.”

“Yes,” Drusilla said, dismissively. “I know that for certain now.”

Angel couldn’t raise his eyes from his own knuckles. “I’ve talked to Fred. She… they won’t continue the treatments, without your consent. Now that you’re, you know…”

“Sane.”

Angel shrugged. “If it helps you make a decision, Drusilla,” her name hung for a moment, as though he couldn’t follow it with another word after it fell off his tongue. He forced himself to meet her steady gaze. “I want you well. I want you reformed. It… it would mean so much to me.”

Her smile was mocking. “I always suspected I was more sane than my wicked boys.”

Angel looked pained. “I know you can’t agree to this, and you won’t…”

“I will.”

He swallowed a mouthful of air. “Will?”

“Foolish Daddy,” she said, with gentle mockery that should have been alien to her voice. Heaving a sigh, she looked past him. “He loves me. I know that now.”

***

Fred entered a silent room – a still room, the absence of those incidental sounds of breath just piled on the creepy factor. “I’ll come back,” she said.

“No,” Angel said, rousing as if from sleep. “I was just on my way out.”

The two vampires didn’t look at each other. Drusilla acted like Angel wasn’t there at all, glancing with bored expectation at Fred and her tray of pills and hypodermics.

Angel stopped and made a few awkward motions like he was going to say something, or maybe hug her or pat her on the arm. She’d have patted HIM on the arm – he looked like he sorely needed it – but she needed both her hands on the tray to keep it steady.

“How’re you doing?” Fred tried for cheery, but it came out suspicious.

Drusilla’s smile was bright and false. “How is my handsome prince?”

Creepy factor ten. Fred placed the tray carefully on the table and answered as though the question were genuine, “He’s doing much better. You know, vampires! The restructuring of the metatarsal was amazing to watch. It was just like… tendons reaching out and grabbing bits of bone like little hands. All those little connections! I almost didn’t want them to stitch the skin back.”

The door shut behind her. Fred grimaced. “Right. Bedside manner, Doctor Burkle.” She busied herself arranging the items on her tray. “Anyway, I brought you some new drugs, but these are only if you agree to them. Let me just explain each one and its probable effects, this first one…”

“I’ll take it,” Drusilla said, extending her chained arms out in front of her.

“I haven’t told you all the pros and cons. You don’t want to just take a psychotropic drug without detailed knowledge and informed consent.”

Drusilla tilted her head back. “You don’t trust me.” Her delicate grin was somewhat proud. “Go on. Give me the shots that will make my prince trust me again.”

Fred slipped into the seat Angel had vacated. “Do you see that? I mean, do you know already which treatment will work?”

Drusilla pursed her lips and shook her head. “If I could direct what I saw, I’d see it. But the visions haven’t been coming. They don’t like the drugs. I wonder if you have to be a little mad to see the future, if I was always mad, then.”

“Drusilla, I don’t feel very good about this, about any of this.”

“Are you going to ask the same questions Angelus asked?”

Fred set the hypodermic down with a tiny click. “We don’t call him ‘Angelus’, you know that.”

“And very silly of you it is.”

“I’m trying to be your friend. If I can, if it’s even possible. I just… you’re evil, aren’t you? Spike is my friend too and it wasn’t easy, seeing him like that. I get all excited about science and biology and magic and things, but you know I still see him, not as a patient but a friend, in pain.”

“I didn’t do anything that wouldn’t heal,” she said, as though this was the most reasonable thing ever spoken.

“But you hurt him!”

Drusilla’s large, dark eyes blinked slowly. “Love hurts,” she said, as though educating a very young person.

***

Fred entered the recovery room with the same quiet reverence everyone had. It made Spike feel like a corpse at a wake. He pushed violently to get himself up and she dropped her box of cookies to run and help him. “Stop! You can’t just go moving around like that. Even vampires have to heal, you know.”

“Can’t take this sitting still,” he said.

“How do you feel?” She picked up the cookies once he settled back on the raised pillows. They’d tumbled out of their little plastic rows and she was grateful for the distraction of putting them back and licking frosting off her fingers. She didn’t want to look at Spike – his joints were hard and purple with swelling.

“As expected,” he said, smiling tiredly at her. “What’s that?” He held out his hand toward the box of cookies.

“Frosted sugar,” she said, avoiding his reach and setting the box on his lap.

“I think I can bear the ponderous weight of a box of cookies,” he chided, and pried open the lid. “How’s Dru?”

“God! I can’t believe you can ask that!”

He raised an eyebrow at her. “It’s only two words.”

“You should be angry!” Spike folded his hands over the cookies and smirked. “I’m serious! No amount of love is worth abuse. Don’t make me make you watch Oprah!”

“Oh, love, if I’d met you twenty years ago.”

Fred dropped onto the side of the bed and slapped at his arm. “You don’t get to be flippant about this, mister. I’ve been studying up on neuroscience, reading medical reports that are worse than Gunn’s legal briefs. Angel’s all quiet all the time and, and… damn it I want to talk to you!”

He rested his head back on the pillow and his eyes closed briefly, looking paper-thin. “What do you want me to say? The cosmic joke is on me once again. The only part of Dru that loved me was the crazy part. Not to be the most self-involved prat in the building, but it does make a bloke think.”

“That’s not true.”

“Is it? We were together over a hundred years. I thought I knew her – all the little bits of her, her lucid moments and her tantrums. I thought knowing Dru was something I had cold.”

Fred shifted closer and placed her hand on his arm. “Now you listen. A person on psychotropic drugs is going to not be themselves. I’ve read all about it now and what you’re saying is common – well, without the near dismemberment part. Families find that their loved one isn’t recognizable until the proper balance is achieved. It can take weeks, months, even years to figure out the right dosages.”

“Fred? Love?” He put his hand over hers. “She’s evil.”

Fred bit her lip. “That does complicate things a little.”

“A little? Soddin’ right.” He shook his head. “Never thought… never really felt it in her, you know? I mean, sure, she’d rip a person apart like a toddler with a doll, but there was innocence there.”

“Now that she’s lucid, well, the evil thing is a choice. I mean, she couldn’t really make an informed choice before.”

He closed his eyes again. “And she made her choice.”

“Well, yeah,” Fred said, an edge to her voice taking the place of the smack she wanted to give him. “She’s going forth with treatment. And she says she loves you, you big idiot. Though that doesn’t mean you should run right back…”

He sprung up eagerly. “She said that?”

“… to a person who would beat you up!”

“But she said she still loves me?”

“I’m going to have to talk to Oprah about you,” Fred said, slipping off the bed. “Are you going to eat your cookies?”

***

It was an irritating day and night, imprisoned by the nurse-maids of the medical wing – and sod it, he was _fine_ already! They kept pushing him back in the bed and poking him with needles and twice he was sure they knocked him out.

But at last he was free, and able to go see Dru. She was taking some new cocktail of medical magic, according to Fred, something to make her less aggressive – it sounded like bollocks to him but he had to see for himself. Better or worse, he had to know.

Drusilla lay against the wall of the holding cell like a wilted flower in a dry glass.

They were restraining her, he saw, silvery cuffs chafed her thin wrists. “Petal?” He stood at the door, waiting for her to look up at him.

Her head rose only a little. “Oh,” she said. “My prince has come at last.”

Spike swallowed a dry lump. “How do you feel, pet?”

“Fuzzy,” she said.

With numb legs he crossed the room and crouched beside her. “I know you were just doing what you had to, to try and get out of here.”

“It wasn’t just that,” she said. Her heavy lids blinked slowly at him. “Daddy came to visit me. Did you know? He came to apologize!”

And she smiled – just a tight stretch of the lips, but for a moment she was alive.

He brushed a lock of hair back and tucked it behind her ear. “I don’t know what to do with you, petal. What are we going to do?”

“I can learn to be good,” she turned into his hand. “Let them change me and we’ll be together. Or they’ll kill me.” She kissed his palm. “Is this what it was like? When you were all alone and helpless?”

A little too quickly, Spike pulled his hand back. “No,” he said.

She turned to rest her head against the wall again. “Winifred is very kindly destroying me. It’s all right; I asked her to. Ironic that this is sanity.”

He picked up her smooth, limp hand. “Who were you, Drusilla, before I met you?”

“I used to believe the fairy stories they told me, about saints and angels. I was a child all my life and death.”

“And now, love?”

She grimaced. “Growing up is terrible. No wonder I put it off so long.”

“I’ll be here with you, love. I won’t leave you again.”

Another tight smile. “Are they watching us? Ready to rush in should you need to be saved?”

Spike chuckled, peering up at the security cameras. “You know old Peaches. Can’t wait to come to my rescue.”

Her face turned toward the wall, her eyes shut firmly with tiny wrinkles. He stroked her hand and arm – back and forth above and below the restraining cuff. He felt afraid, and worried, and wondered if he shouldn’t have paid more attention the last time Fred was babbling medical terms at him.

Drusilla turned her head slightly, eyes slitting like a cat disturbed from its nap. “Bring me some music?”

He laughed. “Of course, love. Whatever you want. I’ll even listen to that awful Raffi bloke for you.” He kissed her forehead and rushed from the room.

She held her hand up, feeling his absence. “There’s never any music anymore,” she said.


	15. Chapter 14: The Weight

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter mostly deals with the issue I like to call "The 'S' Word".

Spike gently dipped and twirled Dru, moving slowly in a mellow box-step. She let herself be moved but did little to add to the dance, her feet dragging and her head resting on Spike’s shoulder.

She started humming the song, and then actually sang as they rocked to the chorus, “Wrapping paper… in the gutter…”

“Do you want to stop, Princess?”

She shook her head. “It’s better to move.”

“How do you feel?”

“Like all the world is wrapped in cotton wool.”

Angel stood in front of the monitors in the security office – just a few yards away from the vampire couple, frowning hard at their image, one fist pressed to his lips.

“They’ve been like that all morning,” the security officer on duty said, and added, “Sir.”

Angel nodded and walked into the hall. Before he signed the contract with Wolfram and Hart, he would have laughed if someone told him the worst part would be never having time alone just to brood.

He stood in front of the holding cell. The long, narrow window in the door occasionally showed a sliver of the dancing couple. No sound escaped.

With a grimace he stepped forward and knocked.

Spike’s expression was wary as he stopped, peering through the glass at him, and then scowled, mouthing something that Angel was pretty sure ended with “Poufter”.

Angel unlocked the door. “Spike, can you come out a minute?”

“Anything you have to say can be said in front of both of us.”

Angel leaned on his forearm in the doorjamb and considered that nothing less true had ever been spoken. “I just want to ask you something, Spike. It’s personal.”

Spike smirked, but he put his cheek on Dru’s and asked, “Love, should I give him the time?”

With a sigh, Drusilla retreated to the bed. “Don’t ask me. I don’t want to make decisions.” She sank gracefully onto the piled cushions, her eyes closed and frowning.

Spike nudged Angel ahead of him out of the room. As the door closed, he said, “I don’t know what Fred has her on lately but it’s killin’ her, Angel. You need to talk to her, get these anti-whatever drugs stopped. They might stop her from wanting to kill, but they also stop her wantin’ to _live_.”

“They won’t be necessary. I called Willow.”

Spike tilted his head. “Did I miss a segue? Not that it isn’t good that you’re actually talking to people, Peaches. Plus Red can help you with your little ‘coming out’ problem.”

Angel rolled his eyes. “Willow performed the soul curse on me. Twice. As far as…”

“No.”

“You aren’t giving me a chance to finish. I asked Willow if the spell could…”

“There. You’re finished. Answer is no.”

Angel frowned. “How can you even say that? You know the difference a soul makes. You, more than anyone…”

“I’m not going to have you shove her soul into her against her will with some trip-wire happiness clause bollocks when she’s barmy enough already.”

Angel had his hands clasped in front of him, his eyebrows raised. “Are you finished?”

“No. You’re finished. What are you _thinking_ , Angel? That you can shortcut this? Wave a witch at Dru and just _fix_ her?”

Angel stepped forward, his head bent to whisper. “It’s not going to work, Spike. You know that. We have to give her back what we took from her.”

Spike stepped back. “You’re more interested in your own stupid redemption than her.”

“Spike…”

“You selfish prick. This isn’t about Dru at all. This is about you.”

Angel gave one of his long-suffering sighs and looked at the ceiling. “Ask her, then, what she wants to do. But Willow is coming and it’s an option. Think about it.”

He walked away without looking back.

Spike returned to the cell to find Drusilla hadn’t moved. He crawled behind her on the bed and settled down to kiss her hair and rest his arm over hers.

“What did Daddy want?”

“Nothing, Petal. It was boorish Angelus garbage. He wants to get you a soul.”

“Oh,” said Dru, re-settling her head against Spike’s shoulder. She was silent a while as Spike kissed her shoulder and ran his hand over the satin smoothness of her arm, and he hoped the subject was discarded as unimportant. But then she turned, eyes clearing a bit as she frowned. “Is it horrid?”

He looked into her eyes, no reflection of himself, there, as always, just beautiful dark pools of midnight. “You said you could see my soul. What does it look like?”

“It just is,” she said, eyes searching. “It’s like a weight that wasn’t there before – or a shine. Maybe it’s like heat.”

“Sounds about right.”

“It hurts," Dru said. Not a question.

He leaned back against the pillows. “Yeah. Supposed to hurt. Worst pain I ever felt. Worse than burning up. It lingers. It’ll lag off a bit, but always be there to jump up and burn you fresh. But you, uh, you get used to it.”

Drusilla turned in a rustle of taffeta and peered down at his face. “I don’t think I should care for it.”

“But you know why, don’t you? Why I did it?”

She traced his cheek. “To burn away mistakes.”

“No.” He caught her hand and turned into the palm. “To be worthy. To make myself a better man.”

“It doesn’t seem better,” she said. “You were glorious. My beautiful killer. You were like fire, so bright and deadly. The moths floated helplessly to you.”

Spike pulled back. “Don’t talk like that. Please. I’m not that man anymore.”

“But you are.” She slipped her leg over his, turning him onto his back and pressing her hands into his shoulders. “You are the killer, the poet, the warrior. What will I be? A broken girl? A prophet with no prophecy? Tell me, William. I’ve been wondering – are the drugs taking my visions from me or is there simply no more future left to see?”

He grabbed her arms. “There’s always a future. Always hope.”

“Is there? In our comfy little goldfish bowl?”

Spike sat up and she obligingly settled on his lap. “This is temporary, love. They don’t trust you yet.”

“They would trust me with a soul.” She made a little ick-face, sticking her tongue out.

“Yeah. Tried to fight that, m’self, but the truth is, its what they know – soul equals good, no soul equals bad.”

“But you trust me without it.” She tilted her head as if trying to figure this out.

He shrugged. “Yeah. Maybe I just want to. Or maybe love does conquer all. It makes poets of monsters and madmen of scholars.”

“So does hate,” she said. “And violence. And Angelus. He made a madwoman of me.”

Spike bit his lip. “It made me mad, when I got it. The guilt, the conflicting desires. Went right over the bend. Worse than you ever were.”

“I’m not afraid of madness,” she said, with perfect clarity.

“We don’t have to give him our answer right now, love. You want to think about it?”

She sighed and let her head drop to his shoulder. “Thinking is tiring. I’m so tired.”

He held her tight. “Just rest, Princess. Just rest for now.”

“But I don’t think I should like a soul,” she said, as he tucked her in. With a sigh, she closed her eyes and relaxed against him. “Pater nosters and confessions and penance and guilt. No, I don’t think I should. I used it far too much when I had it. My soul’s worn thin.”

***

They talked quietly, when she could – the medicine was really doing a number on her. Fred said it was supposed to get rid of her aggression. Spike advised her that she’d see some aggression if they didn’t switch her to something else.

“I’ll see what I can do,” Fred said, helplessly shrugging. “There’s only so many drugs that work at all, and they all have nasty side effects. It’s a crap shoot.”

Spike paced. “You talk to her. No playing dice with my girl’s mind.”

“It's not like there's a choice. But I can try…” But Spike was out the door again already.

He thought he’d swing by the front desk, see what the brooding wonder was up to, and caught the tail end of a conversation, Angel straightening up from leaning on Harmony’s desk and saying something about, “Miss Rosenberg’s room.”

“On it, chief,” Harmony replied cheerfully. “Soon as Willow’s done with Wes she’ll have the poshest bed in the house.”

Spike approached. “Red’s here? You tell her Dru’s not going for it?”

There was no mistaking the glimmer of guilt in Angel’s eyes – he wore that so often.

“Oh hell no,” Spike said.

Angel gestured at Spike. “ _You_ got a soul!”

“Maybe I didn’t need to!”

“Would you listen to yourself?”

“I am listening, Angelus. I listened to her, anyway. She isn’t afraid of death and she isn’t afraid of madness, for god’s sake, but she’s afraid of a soul and I don’t want to do that to her.”

“You want her redeemed but you don’t want her to suffer any of it? Spike, you can’t protect her from her own choices.”

“Maybe not, but I can protect her from mine.”

“It doesn’t matter. Wesley and Willow have already started gathering components.”

“You said you’d give her the choice.”

“I lied.” Angel stepped back. “Come on, Spike! Think about it. It’s the only way.”

“No. No it bloody well isn’t.” He took off toward Wesley’s office. If there was mojo brewing he was sure that’s where they’d do it.

“You’re making a mistake,” Angel called after him. He sighed, hearing the door slam with wood-cracking force. “He’s making a mistake,” Angel repeated, to himself.


	16. Chapter 15: A Right Way to do the Wrong Thing

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hope you enjoy this latest chappie of the Spike/Dru adventure. It starts getting even more angsty at this point!

“Stop. Whatever the bloody hell you’re doing, just stop!”

Wesley looked up from his book as Spike stormed in the door, arms waving. Setting his hand carefully to mark his place in the text, he raised an eyebrow.

“Spike!” Willow sat back on her heels, tossing little sticks into a copper crucible. “Alive. Oh. Hey. I, uh, knew that, but still, seeing you is like… wow, you’re really alive.”

“An’ intending to stay that way.” He snatched the orb of Thesula up from its satin box and passed it behind his back. “This stops. No mojo.”

The witch and the watcher exchanged glances. “I thought this is what you wanted,” Wesley said in an even tone. “Willow traveled all this way to help.”

Willow hurried to add, “I’d been thinking about the soul-curse for years – it was my first big spell, and when you know the components, I mean, how it was put together…”

“So write a paper. You’re not doing that to Dru.”

Wesley stood. “Be reasonable. I would have thought you, of all vampires…”

“What with the soul-having and earning!” Willow amended for him, gesturing with her burning incense.

“I didn’t know what I was doing,” Spike said, a solemn look passing over his face. “Nearly lost my mind. Hell, I did, but I only barely got it back. Dru…” He crouched next to Willow, his fists clenched around the orb, as though it held understanding in it and he could give it to her, “Dru’s not that strong.”

Willow frowned. “If you’re worried about the happiness clause…”

Spike straightened with a disgusted look. “I’m not. Ta.”

“Because Angel pretty much proved that pure happiness doesn’t equal groiny happiness, and the spell HAS to have an escape clause. It’s the way gypsy curses are built, with…”

Willow glanced up at Wesley, who had come up behind her to put his hand on her shoulder. He shook his head very slightly.

Spike rolled the orb of Thesula in his hand like a baseball he was about to hurl. “No one,” he pointed it at them, “is soulling up my Dru.”

“Understood. Now may I please have the valuable magical artifact back?” Wesley held out his hand.

Spike looked down at the orb, his fingers curled around it, rolled it so two knuckles were pressed to it. He really looked like he was going to fling it at a wall for about a second, and then he grudgingly handed it to Wes. Before he let go, he said, “I’m trusting you on this, Percy.”

“I don’t see what the deal is,” Willow popped up, hands on her hips. “Spike, you went and got a soul for yourself. I mean, yeah I know there was the scary crazy stage and all, but come on! You got through it.”

He glared coolly at her. “You want to go ask Dru her preference?”

Willow blanched at the thought. “Well, I mean… it’s not like…”

There was a gruff sigh from just outside the door. Angel leaned in. “It doesn’t matter, Spike. No soul, no more staying under my roof. It’s just the way it is. We don’t have the time or resources to spend reforming a soulless demon. I let you and Fred try…”

“It’s been three bloody weeks!”

“Long enough. We need a more sure solution.”

“He has a point,” Wes said. He held his book over his chest. “Spike, think: how would you have felt if someone tried to stop you regaining your soul.”

“But it was my bloody choice!” His neck was all cord, strained forward. “Wankers!” he made a motion like throwing a towel on the ground and stormed out.

Silence reigned in his wake until Willow said, “Um, should someone maybe go after him?”

Angel sighed, rubbing his forehead. “Which would mean me.”

“Certainly not,” Wes said. He set his book down. “That would be the stupidest idea you’ve had all week.” He walked out the door. By his manner, it was unclear if he was following Spike or not.

Willow cleared her throat. “Should I, I mean, continue the spell?”

Angel left without answering.

Willow gazed around at the carefully gathered spell components, her notes all color-coordinated and annotated with phonetic spellings. “All witched up and no place to cast.” She set down the incense with a sigh and went over to Wes’ desk. “Not a trip wholly wasted,” She smirked, pulling the ‘key’ volume toward herself. “Hello book. Show me…”

***

Angel found Wesley in the lab, chatting with Fred. “Where’s Spike?”

“Storming off,” Wesley supplied, unhelpfully. “Angel, have you really thought this through? All these resources, all of our time and focus…”

“Wes, don’t,” Fred touched his arm.

“It’s a romanticism we can’t afford.”

“Yeah, Wes.” Angel fished his cell out of his pocket and grimaced distastefully – but then he always did that when he looked at the little torture device. “I know.”

***

Spike was finally getting to the bloke in Accounts Receivables who owed him money when the theme from the old 60s Batman show started to play on his cell. The poofter alert. He rolled his eyes and flipped it open anyway. “Haven’t changed my mind and not going to. How are you?”

There was a pause, no doubt as Angel tried to figure out how Spike knew it was him, and then Angel said, “We don’t have a choice.”

“Seems to me it’s you making it that way.”

“Spike!” Oh how he loved hearing his name used so plaintively, like it was a mild curse. “I don’t have the courage to slay her, all right? I can’t do it. I know you can’t. This is the only alternative.”

“In your august opinion. Sorry, no.” And Spike folded the phone shut. The man he was there to see was approaching. “Davis. Calling in my marker.” He smiled his best predator’s grin; glad to hear he could still make a heartbeat speed up with nary a threat.

***

Angel called an emergency senior staff meeting, plus Willow, minus Spike, but then Spike had never really been staff to begin with.

They voted. They argued. They voted again.

Charles Gunn was the most vocal supporter of Spike’s mad plan to reform Drusilla. “You can’t make decisions for her. She is a cognizant adult.”

“But she’s evil. An evil, soulless vampire, like the kind we kill whenever we can. What makes one vampire any different from another?” Willow gestured at Angel, “A soul.”

Angel winced as though he’d been accused of something. “Lorne? You’ve been quiet all night. Did you read anything on her?”

Lorne had two fingers pressed to his lips. He blinked, coming out of a reverie. Sighed, sat back and found his drink on the side table. “It’s like this, kids. Never read a psychic’s aura. Seriously. Don’t do it.”

Angel tried a small smile. “That’s not really helping.”

“Well, maybe I don’t feel like helping.” Lorne took a long sip of his drink in the silence that followed his shockingly vitriolic response. He sighed. “You’ve made your decisions. You’re just looking for a way to have your redemption and eat it too. You said she refuses to have a soul. So her choice is made. Either this is all just shuffling our feet before the execution so we can say we really really thought about it, or you are willing to make her suffer an unwanted soul to assuage your own guilt.”

“Lorne!” Fred gasped.

“Angel-pie knows what that feels like. And he’s willing to force someone else to suffer it. I can’t say I’m very happy with the champ at the mo’. So you all understand why my main plan was to ignore this, keep doing my little part to end evil through top quality entertainment, and prevent a surplus of gin from haunting our stockroom.” He raised his glass in mocking salute.

“Or,” said Gunn, “we just let them have some time. Maybe redemption doesn’t have to come with a soul. I mean, Spike chose to get his soul, right? Didn’t he do that when he didn’t have one? Doesn’t that itself mean that a soulless vampire can choose to be good?”

Willow raised her hand like she was in school. “That was really complicated. And he was, um, well there was the whole chip thing and falling in love and Buffy dying and coming back and,” her voice lowered with her hand and she shrugged. “I just don’t see it all happening a second time.”

Angel was quiet, looking at Lorne, who was pointedly looking out the window, ignoring everyone. He picked up his phone. “We don’t have time to indulge my guilt or my personal hope for redemption. I’ll have security take care of it. They can put her under, make it painless, make it quick.”

They were all silent as he dialed. Fred turned her face into Wesley’s chest and he lifted his arm to hold her.

“Hello? Yes, this is Angel. It’s about Drusilla. Is she awake? Well, go check. I… yes, I’m holding.” He looked around the room, embarrassed and feeling awful for the mundanity of action after an unwanted decision. “Hello? Yes, is she… ? Uh-huh. Um. Okay. Yes. Yes, do that.” Angel hung up the phone. He put his hands in his pockets and bit his lip, looking at a room full of angry, stoic, and sad expressions, most waiting to hear what he said. He cleared his throat. “Drusilla… she, well, she’s escaped.”


	17. Chapter 16: Mr. Soul

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Here it is, the long-awaited last chapter of "Crazy Madcap Redemption"! I hope it at least minimally lives up to the anticipation. All I can say is, though I had this plotted out, the last scene and the one before it just kept sucking major and I had to walk away for a while. On coming back I found my solution was to delete half of them. Well, let me know if it worked!

Breathless, Spike arrived at Drusilla’s cell. He had only a few seconds to get her, while the camera was off – a long series of arrangements and heads turned away that would only align for a moment, and if his heart would beat, it would be pounding in fear.

Drusilla was standing demurely by the door, a cardboard case in one hand and her latest doll in the other.

Spike stared at the carefully constructed suitcase – she must have worked some time to make it out of the box he’d brought, twisting two scarves around it for strength and a third for a handle.

She stepped past him into the hallway. “You’re rescuing me, aren’t you?”

“Yes. Yes, love. I thought… well, I thought you weren’t seeing things anymore.”

“I’m not. Some things you just know.”

He shook his head once and hurried to follow her down the hallway. “Left – we have to take the service stairs.”

Dru descended the steps speedily ahead of him, her best shoes making delicate clacking noises and the cardboard case hitting her thigh as she went. Spike twirled the keys in his hand. He’d already arranged for Angel’s Viper to be at the base of the steps, waiting for them.

Drusilla deserved to be rescued in style, after all.

He opened the car door for her and she set her case on the seat. “Are those the keys to the car?”

“Yes, love. Now get in, we have to hurry. I give us ten seconds before someone notices that…”

His words were cut off with a metallic clang, a sickening, swirling view of the garage ceiling, and then darkness.

***

“What is it with you?”

Spike groaned, recognizing the voice and not being particularly interested in opening his eyes to see the body that accompanied it. Besides, his head felt as if a freight train had run over it – or was inside it, trying to get out.

Reluctantly, he slit one eye open to get a fuzzy view of Angel’s shiny leather shoes pacing oily concrete. “I can count the number of times my girlfriend knocked me cold on one hand. All girlfriends. And I dated _Darla_.”

“Oh, fuck.” Spike rolled onto his hands and knees, blinking against the bleariness. “Dru!”

A large hand hooked around his arm, stopping him before he started scrambling. “Long gone. We have people searching.”

“Angel, she…”

“Don’t.” Angel hauled him painfully to his feet. “Just don’t say anything. Harmony, can you get him to the infirmary?”

“Sure thing, Bossy.” More delicate hands took the place of Angel’s, and Spike found himself leaning against Harmony’s soft, heavily perfumed shoulder.

“Don’t blame her,” he mumbled as Harmony deposited him against the rail in the elevator. “I’d have done the same. Think I did, once or twice.”

“ _Not_ saying I told you so,” Harmony said. “But I did. A lot.”

Spike let himself just stare blankly at the elevator ceiling while Harmony muttered on about “ungrateful skanks” and men who don’t know a perfectly good girl when they’ve got one.

Feeling wretched, not knowing what to think, he tried not to think at all.

***

Drusilla ran all night. Ran as fast as vampire feet could carry her, unmindful of the shocks and jolts of sidewalk and roof-top, not looking left or right, not thinking, she ran.

But when the sun peered over the horizon she had to stop, and her thoughts caught up with her.

She killed, for the first time in months. He was a janitor or repairman, in a tan uniform with his name, Juan, embroidered over the pocket. He’d had bratwursts recently and the garlic still infused his skin oils, but otherwise his blood didn’t taste of anything special, it was just blood. She remembered discerning pasts and aborted futures in the taste of blood, but perhaps that was her madness, or the prescience that came with it was truly lost to her.

She left Juan where she’d found him, a dusty room full of machinery on a rooftop, and descended through the building and into a basement storeroom, just as dusty. She rested her forehead on her cool arm and waited to feel her sanity slip away.

“I’m not afraid of madness,” she said, and smiled a little, because it was a lie. But she knew what it was, to be mad, and so it had none of the horror of the unknown, only the cold dread of helplessness. She knew, without the medicines, she would go mad.

She knew that with them, Spike would not love her long. And the foolish boy still didn’t understand her, how well she knew him. He would have run away with her, tarnished his soul and his precious redemption to care for her once again, hold her hands and brush her hair from her eyes when she went wild, forgive her when she came home with bloodstained lips. And she would. Until he would either go mad as well, or stake her.

She cannot see it, but she knows. Some things you just know.

Then there was the other possibility – if she had insisted on not escaping. A few words, a stern face was all it would have taken. He would have relented, and sat with her while downstairs they plotted her death.

And from there she saw too many possibilities, all bad, and only a few ended with him still loving her. Those were the most frightening, because she did not love him, so stupidly doting and forgiving and pretending she was the same, though she wasn’t, she was a dry husk, burning inside.

And there was something in that so alien she could only approach the thought sidways.

So she laid her cheek on her tear-wet arm and waited to slowly go mad.

***

“You knew this would happen.”

Spike used his sword to help himself to his feet and glared at Angel. “Better than standing here talking at the thing. Now come on.” He shook his coat back into place on his shoulders and limped in the direction their query-du-jour had run.

“When I said we can’t take a full-grown Ramori out on our own, I did not mean jump on the nearest underling.”

“Right, and your ‘bore evil to death’ strategy was working so well.” Spike spun on his heel just long enough to smirk at Angel before jogging in the direction the big demon had gone with what remained of its entourage.

Despite a long silence after Drusilla’s disappearance, Spike thought things were back to normal between Angel and himself – the bickering was its usual light-hearted cover over their more awkward emotions. All he had to do was catch up with Huge, Green, and Scaly, and there’d be some therapeutic violence to cap off the night. So he was more than a little surprised when an Angel-shaped bulldozer knocked him into the alley wall.

He turned to glare at Angel, who pushed off of him with an angry shove. “I would have thought you’d get the hint, Spike: your plans are worth crap.”

Spike turned resolutely away. “Bastard’s getting a lead.”

“We’re letting this one go.”

Spike looked down at Angel’s hand on his elbow. “Might want to remove that before I do.”

Angel let go. He took a step back and flexed his fists, trying not to make it worse, like he always did, when talking to Spike. The most innocuous statement could turn a disagreement into a fight and he wasn’t going to set off the powder keg this time. He just needed to not say… “You won’t bring her back.”

And Angel bit his lip, cursing himself with an upward glance as Spike very slowly turned. “What did you say?”

“Gee, Spike, maybe the obvious? You’re trying to compensate for setting Drusilla free by throwing yourself at everything with horns.” Angel stopped, considering his words. “That didn’t come out quite right.”

“Right.” Spike threw his hand up dismissively. “You and your little theories have fun. I have demons to kill.”

“Spike, I let you…”

He was back in Angel’s face in an instant. “LET me?”

“I let you get away with unleashing her. And I let you pout about it for two weeks like a pre-teen. This ends now.”

“You’re supposed to be the king of guilt. She was trying, damn it. She was going through hell to live up to your ideals and you nearly killed her. You drove her out!”

“No, that would be you, letting her escape.”

“At least I did what I could by her.”

“Oh yeah! By letting her loose on the world…”

A shadow fell over the bickering vampires, who had been nose-to-nose, posturing for the inevitable fight.

They both looked up into the grinning maw of the Ramori demon, impossibly wide with dagger-like yellow teeth. It’s hot breath bathed them as it laughed. It had brought friends with it.

Angel glared at Spike, who shrugged. They turned together and buried their fists wrist-deep in the beast’s spongy hide.

The fight started, Angel continued his statement, “…with no medication, no leash, nothing to stop her from killing and going mad. And weren’t you the one who told me we shouldn’t ignore our responsibility toward her?”

“Responsibility!” Spike, who had ended up on the back of one of the beasts, wrenched its neck hard and dropped with it to the pavement. “You’re responsible. You drove her mad in the first…” A fat tail swept him into a brick wall.

“Surprised you know the meaning… uh! Of the word!” Angel hacked his way through two beasts, hoping that he was heading toward a more defensible position toward the back of the alley.

“You forced her to love you… you drove her to it… but she chose to love me, and you can’t let go of that,” Spike snarled, between stabs and swings and kicks.

“Great. Now I have to remind you. At THIS lovely moment,” Angel kicked a demon off his sword. “That _she_ left you. Ah!” A raking claw tore through Angel’s shoulder, his numb fingers let go of his sword.

Angel and Spike ended up back to back, covered in the sticky green blood of the Ramoris, and surrounded. The big demon had hardly moved, letting his spawn wear them down.

“She didn’t leave me,” Spike said, quietly, and of course even he didn’t believe it.

Grimacing and not fond of their odds at the moment, Angel conceded, “She left us both.”

The Ramori boss grinned even wider – its freakish triangle of a mouth bubbling with saliva. “And now, vampire, you and your date will die.”

“He’s not my date,” they said in unison.

And then, promptly, the Ramori exploded.

Two gore-splattered vampires and a semi-circle of demons equally splattered stared at his thick legs and tail, standing on their own.

There was a quiet sound, like a ratchet, and then a “twang!” and another demon burst like a watermelon hit with a mallet.

The Ramori demons fled in all directions, stumbling over themselves to get away.

Spike and Angel looked at each other. “Did you?” ask Angel.

Spike shook his head. “Got a bit of spleen or something, right here,” he scratched his nose.

Angel flicked the indicated chunk of demon flesh off his face.

A crossbow landed with a wooden clatter in one clean spot of the ally. They looked up.

Drusilla stood on the rooftop, in a long white gown of diaphanous material. The wind blew it and her loose hair, which shone bright in the moon. “Bolts of pure emerald,” she said. “The fairies adore emeralds. Boom! Squish!” She smacked her hands hard together and then fanned them out to mimic an explosion. “The elephants dance on the graveyard of the mice.”

Angel, stunned, didn’t realize he’d stepped forward until he felt Spike’s hand digging hard into his arm.

“Dru,” Spike said. “Love, what are you doing up there? Did you follow us? Have you… have you been up there long?”

She lifted her chin. “Sometimes princesses have to rescue their knights.”

“That’s right, pet. Good job, that was. Why don’t you come down here…”

She turned and slipped away from view.

Spike muttered a curse and jumped at the wall, scrambling up it and leaving a grime of demon guts in his wake.

“Dru!” Spike called from the rooftop. Angel stared at the empty street on the other side, wondering where she could have gotten too.

“Shhh…”

He turned to see her waving to him in the middle of the street.

“Drusilla.” He took one step forward. She shook a finger at him in admonishment and stepped, confidently knowing it would be there, onto the back of a passing truck.

She waved, singing, “And fate is setting up the chessboard while death rolls out the dice. Anyone for tennis, wouldn't that be nice?”

Spike landed on the ground beside Angel, holding his side. “Dru!”

It was Angel’s turn to hold him back. They didn’t have long to watch before she was out of sight again.

Spike fell against the wall. “Always said… always said there was something like good in her.”

Angel nodded, and winced, as he tried to move his injured arm. “Let’s go home,” he said. “She may just prove us both wrong.”

“That’s my girl,” Spike said, smiling. He glanced back once more in the direction she had gone and set off back toward Wolfram and Hart with a spring in his step.

She would prove them wrong. And she would come back.

Some things you just knew.

 

THE END


End file.
